Fight Club

Jayden created his own punching bag today that he hung off the deck!

You just can't ever have enough ninja training.

Is Summer Here?

I think summer may have finally showed up!  Well my PNW instincts say it feels like summer, but my Kansas instincts say this is really just spring and summer will be much, much, hotter.
It was predicted to be around 90 on Tuesday, so Monday evening we blew up and filled the new summer pool - we have to get a new one every year, because we've never had one actually make it through the summer.  By the time summer is over, our little blow up pool is totally thrashed!
Our crazy kids tried to go swimming in it Monday night, but came to their senses when they stuck their feet in.  I told them that we'd let it sit out in the sun all day on Tuesday and it would feel so much better to swim in with the air being hot and the water getting warmed up.  So they went to bed, and I kid you not, first thing in the morning they put their suits on and declared the water must be warmer.   I'm fairly positive it wasn't, but who am I to squash their enthusiasm.  :)  They would yell at me, "I'm going into the pool to become an ice-cube!"  Then they'd sit in the sun until their lips weren't blue anymore and go ice-cube themselves again.  Willow had to change her suit each time because, well, she's Willow. :)

The End of Happy Feet

Willow finished up her Happy Feet soccer season today!  And while I think she liked playing soccer, I think she was most excited about finding every dirt pile on the field and making sure she ran through it as many times as possible.  :)

Jayden entertained himself each week by finding sticks (or like today, logs) for his stick collection. 

Soccer with friends is fun!  :)

Tree Climbin'

Jayden is loving to climb lately.  I caught him climbing up my garden trellises in order to get on top of our fence in order to scooch along the top for one of his Mission Impossible missions.   Lately, he has figured a way to get in the Willow tree and each day he has climbed higher and higher and he now climbs to the top, and jumps over our fence into our neighbors yard.  I'm a little nervous to bring him to Washington where the trees grow so tall.   :)

I figure once the Willow tree's leaves finally fill in, he's going to have a nice little hideout up there.

Praire Fire Spring Half

It has been almost 19 months since my last half marathon, can you believe it? Did you think I might have actually considered my last one, my last one????  Well this weekend was #10, and I already know this isn't my last one because I'm signed up for #11 in September - there was a groupon on a new See Jane Run race and I can't pass up a deal!  :)  I trained with Tonya's Moms in Motion group again and all winter while we were running with literally ice-icicles forming at the ends of our hair, we looked forward to this race.  It is going to be in May!  It's warm in May!  It's going to feel so good to run in warm air!  Well that didn't happen.  It's May and still freezing outside!  On race morning, it was 42, but felt like 37 outside and there was a nice freezing cold misting rain coming down that continued throughout the whole race.
In true fashion, my kids brought some infectious disease into the house the week before my race.  On Monday, my throat felt funny,  Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, each day I woke up feeling worse until I had a headache, body aches, my chest was tight, and my sinuses completely blocked off.  I wasn't so sure how I was going to run on Sunday.  I had been using these essential oils my mother-in-law had brought with her, to help with the symptoms by rubbing them on my neck and chest and they helped quite a bit with that, but I wasn't feeling any better.  Thursday morning I was standing in the kitchen drinking some water when I felt one of my ribs literally going "pop!"  So after rolling around on my foam roll trying to help it back into place, I finally called my chiropractor and made an appointment for later that day.  She adjusted me and told me to try putting some of the oils on my feet before bed and then drinking a couple drops.  Um....gross.  But she insisted that I'd feel better and at this point I was willing to try anything.  Friday morning and I kid you not, I felt a ton better.  I don't know if it was the essential oils or getting adjusted or a combination of the two, but I couldn't believe it.  It made a big enough difference that I continued to drink the essential oils before bed and put them on my feet for the next 2 nights and I woke up Sunday morning at 5:30am for the race and my sinuses were completely clear.  I laid in my bed and could breathe in and out my nose.  Of course, then I had to stand up and everything started draining again and my nose started running and I still had a cough, but I felt good enough to go try and run 13.1 miles!
Here is the group that I ran with this winter.

The race was fun.  The course was super flat and I ran with my friend Dianna.  It was her first half marathon and her family was running around the course ahead of us, so we would run by them every 2-3 miles.  My family couldn't be there for this race because Royal had to drive his parents back up to the airport in Kansas City, so my kids were at home with a babysitter.  I felt okay during the run.  I could tell I'd been laying around for a week - things felt a bit rusty, and I felt like I was blowing my nose every quarter mile, and by the end of the race my stomach was so sore from trying to run and cough at the same time.  Who knew that trying to cough and run at the same time would be so hard???  And of course I hit my dreaded mile 8-10, but it wasn't as terrible as past races.  While training for this race I purposefully made myself run high miles early in my training in an attempt to get over my mile 9 depression.   Those runs felt so good that I even had a thought that maybe this race would be the race where I finished and might actually think, "Hmmm, maybe I could run 1 more mile"  You see, in the back of my mind I've been toying with the idea of running a marathon.  Before now, a marathon has been on the heck no, never gonna happen list.  But for some reason a marathon has been trying to tempt me into training for it and I thought that maybe at the end of this race if I thought that my body felt like it could run another mile a marathon might get more of a consideration.  But pretty much at the end of this 13.1 miles, I was spent and there was no "I could run just one more mile" left in me.  That might of been because I was sick, but it's still how I felt.   Dianna and I finished the race in 2:05.  Not my fastest time, but still an okay time for me, and a great time for Dianna's first half!

Jayden's Birthday Weekend

Jayden opted this year to not have a birthday party with friends, he wanted to go to the Great Wolf Lodge.  However, I missed using a coupon and the GWL is gosh darn expensive if you don't have one.   So, we decided to try out a different place this time and we went to Coco Keys Waterpark.  It is pretty much just as fun as GWL waterpark and about half the price!  :)  We went up to the hotel Friday night and managed to get a sweet deal where they included 4 passes to the KC zoo for $10 more. 
Saturday morning, Jayden and Royal headed right off to the tube slides, while Willow and I went around the lazy river.  I should of counted how many times we went around the river, it was Willow's favorite place be and we spent probably 75% of our time there with her swimming and swimming and swimming for hours.  I went around enough times that I know it is an average of 150 steps around.  :)  I figure it was a good workout since I missed my running club that morning.

Going down the tube slides with Jayden.

Saturday night, we stayed the night in a different hotel and managed to get a sweet hookup.  When we checked in, they had us booked in a room with 1 king sized bed and the only way for us to get a room with 2 beds was to upgrade.  For $25 we upgraded to a secure floor (you feel so fancy when you have to put your keycard into the elevator to punch in your hotel floor), we had access to the club where there was a refrigerator full of bottled water and sodas that we could have as much as we wanted (just the bottled water was worth it since hotel water tastes awful!), there were free appetizers in the evening we could cash in on, and then we also got free breakfast in the morning.  It was awesome!  Royal hung out in the club that evening watching basketball, while the kids watched a movie on our tv.  He brought me a tea they had up there to make up for ditching me for a couple hours.  :)
Sunday morning, after breakfast, we packed up and used our zoo passes to kill a few hours before we had to pick up Royal's parents from the KC airport.
We got to the zoo just in time to watch their live bird show.  I thought Jayden was going to fall out of his chair when they brought out a Peregrine Falcon.  It is Jayden's all time favorite bird because it can fly/dive up to 200 mph.  Going to the zoo with Jayden is a lot of fun.  He can retain facts about animals like it's nobody's business, and he has multiple animal books at home that he has read and reread and not to mention all the Wild Kratts episodes, so there's no need to read the signs, he will tell you all you need to know!  At the end of the bird show you could bring a dollar up to the front and give it to a Blue Hyacinth Macaw and he would put it in a mailbox.

Then we took a ride over the zoo to see the animals from high up!

Jayden took most of the pictures at the zoo, included a whole bunch of Royal's rear-end.  He kept giggling while we were walking and once I downloaded all of his pictures, I had a pretty good idea why.  :)
Royal carried Willow A. Lot.  She was pretty tuckered out from all of our swimming the day before and let's face it, who the heck sleeps good when they are in a hotel???

Jayden asked me to stand in the woods, so he could take my picture.  Guess he wanted me to be in my natural habitat as well.  :)

Here are some of Jayden's favorite animals.

Little Swimming Fish

Both of the kids are still doing really great in swimming.  I forgot to post this last month, but both kids moved up a level.  Jayden went from level 4b to level 5, and Willow went from level 3 up to 4a.

The swim club has been going through some management changes and we have been trying to ride out the storm because with the director of the swim club leaving, so left some of my very favorite teachers that have been working with Jayden and Willow since the beginning.  And the teachers that they brought in to fill some of the gaps just were not good.  I try not to be too critical, because for goodness sakes my kids are young and it's not like I'm training up Olympic athletes, and if they are having fun, then I can be okay with that.  But I do have a problem when I'm paying you to teach my kids to swim and you sit on the side of the pool and gossip with a fellow teacher the entire lesson and not actually get in the water, and then have my son swim a 50 breaststroke and then tell him what he did wrong after he got back instead of stopping him in the middle and fixing it.  But this past session, both Jayden and Willow were in the same class because of teacher shortages, but their teacher was awesome!  She also happen to have her son shadowing her so he could start teaching swim lessons as well, so the last 2 weeks of the session, he took Jayden aside and started working on more advanced skills for him.  Both Jayden and Willow have talked more about swimming this past month than they have in a long time.  Good teachers make such a difference! 

Willow and Jayden both use snorkels for part of their lessons, I guess it helps with body positioning, but they look so darn funny in the things!

 Here is Willow working on her racing dives.

One of the last things they are trying to work with Jayden on is his 100 IM (25 butterfly, 25 backstroke, 25 breaststroke, 25 freestyle), and once he has that mastered, he can try out for the swim teams if he wants.

His teacher is actually the current state champion in butterfly, so Jayden is pretty sure he's going to be the one to teach him how to be fast enough to beat his Uncle Jordan in the pool at it.