Sweet Little Kayaks

I found these really fantastic yellow kayaks on an online yard sale and I thought they would be so so fun for our trip out west this summer.  So after sitting in our garage for the past couple months, with the kids every once in awhile jumping in them and pretending to paddle, we took them out to El Dorado today with some friends, with their kayaks too, to swim and paddle around!

It took Jayden a little bit to get the hang of it, and the 20mph wind that was blowing didn't help, but eventually he got it and was paddling around everywhere - and then being blown into shore - and then getting pushed back out and paddling around - and then being blown back into shore.  I'm just thankful the wind wasn't blowing him out to the middle of the lake!  They are going to be so much fun this summer!

And this is what happens when you tried to get two paddlers into one boat. :)

Willow went for one little ride in the kayak with Royal and instantly asked to be taken back to shore.  She played around on the beach for awhile and played in the water for awhile, but she finally started having a great time when someone brought out a kite and put that 20mph wind to good use!

Lumberjack Royal

Today, we went over and helped some friends whose yard took a hard hit from the last hail storm and had a bunch of dead trees that needed taking down.  Royal was more than excited to get to use his chain saw.

It's always fun to get to see someone doing something that they get all excited about.  We don't get to see Royal doing something he really loves very often.  Fishing and hunting require getting up way to early for me.  Using a chainsaw, well you gotta do that in the middle of the day!  There were only a couple times I thought for sure he was going to take off his leg and it also meant I was dragging limbs and stacking firewood all day.  Not exactly something I really love, but I'm willing to do it so Royal can chop things up with a gas powered chain.  That's just how great I am.  :)

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!