the here and now

It helps to show up on time

2011-03-20T13:57:00.001-07:00

Today was the first day of Bubby's new swim session. Since he's now 3 we don't have to go in the pool with him which I was looking forward to. I got the girls fed and we were on our way to class and on time even - which is a miracle these days. Then when we got there I found out that we had showed up at the wrong time - one hour late! So I asked him if he just wanted to swim in the outdoor family pool with me and he said okay (the swim class is affiliated with the club we belong to). We didn't last that long since it was a bit chilly, even though it was heated well above 80 degrees we weren't moving enough to stay warm. I had just wanted him to get used to the water again since he hadn't been in a pool in months. And unfortunately he didn't want to go in the hot tub which would have been really nice. We did a quick change in the outdoor locker room and then got some hot chocolate before heading home.

Bubby has become really logical in his thinking and conversation so these were some of the many questions I got from him:

"Why did we swim in the outdoor pool?"
"Did they tell us we had to go home?"
"Why did we swim so short?"
"Why is steam coming out of the pool?"
"Which door did we go in?" (referring to the locker room)
"Why is there no hair dryer"? (like there is in his usual locker room)
"Do the girls go there and boys go there?" (I haven't even attempted to explain why he still goes to the girls' room with me)
"Is hot chocolate food?"

He did also watch me earlier in the day do the entire kenpo workout for P90x that honestly I didn't really enjoy. I've done one week of the workouts and really liked everything except for the yoga and kenpo. For future weeks I can probably tough it out for 45 min of the yoga (not 90) and will just go running instead of doing the kenpo.

The girls also had fun modeling their Tour de France onesies that E. got them....cutest outfits ever!

Sleeping, eating, running

2011-03-11T08:25:00.000-08:00

I haven't posted in a while but we are all doing great. The girls are eating and sleeping well. They've grown a lot - around 10 lbs now! Thankfully the tandem nursing has been going well so that gives me some options depending upon how their schedules are each day and what time they wake up. They are more awake in between meals so it's more fun although more work also. Here Princess is taking one of her frequent afternoon naps on her tummy. She's the one that likes to sleep and eat more.

Shortly after my last post I tried out the moby wrap (and so did K) and we LOVE it. There have been times that we each have a girl in the wrap. I've taken short walks around the neighborhood with it although longer walks are still in the double stroller. Yesterday I finally got my infant seat adapter into the Bob and tried it out with Bertie. You can see she was a little skeptical although I had a great time pushing my Bob compared with the double stroller. I've started jogging a bit, just 15 minutes or so the last two days.

We've settled into somewhat of a routine although we're still mostly at home and I've been working on getting out more with them. Last week D. and I ventured to Target with them for a little shopping but I have yet to take them out on my own. We still have a lot of fun visitors coming by so that we never get bored even being at home.

And my workout buddy Kdog who over the years has done all my big races with me (Alcatraz swim, Nike marathon) has insisted that we start P90x. I have ~90 days left of my maternity leave so this seems like a good window of time if I'm ever going to try it. She made me take the "before" pictures the other day, which was 7 weeks postpartem for me...yikes. Regardless it'll be a good chance to see her more and have some additional motivation. I think Sunday or Monday will be day 1!

And now that the girls are sleeping longer at night, they're usually sleeping when Bubby wakes up in the morning so we have a nice window of time together before he heads to school. Right now we're eating a leisurely breakfast together!

The Gentle Leader

2011-02-20T20:25:00.000-08:00

Today we tried out the Gentle Leader collar on Nikko - recommended by D our daytime baby helper. It worked really well and reduced the amount of pulling she did. We went out on a ~1 mile jog with it and she only pulled a little bit when she saw squirrels, which is understandable since her outings have been greatly reduced since the arrival of the girls.

I'm now in that mode that I remember back after Bubby's birth when I really do want to get out and exercise, but often the opportunity doesn't present itself or I'm just too tired. It's tough choosing between exercise and sleep! Last Friday I was going to go swimming at the outdoor pool at our gym, but the weather was just terrible. I've done a little yoga and mostly walking. Hopefully I'll get around to the swim sometime in the next week or so.

The girls are one month old and both over 8 lbs now! They seem to be going through a growth spurt so I'm nursing even more than I was before, which was already a lot. But I've read that breastfeeding twins burns 1000 calories a day, which seems to be the case since I'm hungry ALL the time.

One of the girls has been nicknamed Princess since birth and that still seems to suit her. The other one was Birdie at birth since she was smaller and looked like a little bird, but now that she's caught up in weight and doesn't look anything like she did before, K suggested we call her Bertie (as in King George VI) since we really liked the movie and it was the only one we've seen together for a long time. Anyway, they seem more aware of each other now and Princess gives Bertie some really funny looks sometimes, like she wants her to keep to her own side!

Hooray for MILs

2011-02-12T06:47:00.000-08:00

My MIL has been in town for a week now. She came around this same time when Bubby was born so we have somewhat of a tradition of her taking the babies on their first walk outside and giving them their first bath at home. Their first walk was to the nearby playground with their brother. They slept so well in the stroller that we've been walking a lot with them. Yesterday we walked with the stroller for 45 min and the day before for an hour. I'm just using a double snap-n-go and while it's definitely not as easy to maneuver as the single (especially over any kind of small curb) we were still able to go at a pretty brisk pace and get some exercise.

Earlier in the week I tried jogging for a short stretch - on my own, no stroller. I did < 1 mile and it felt okay, not great. So far I'm not planning on getting a double jogging stroller since it would slow me down so much I really wouldn't be jogging anymore. My plan is just to rotate the kids each time I run and just walk when I want to take both the girls out. If I want a double stroller that's easier to push I'll look for that when they're a little bigger. I'm also excited for them to get to 8 lb so I can try the Moby. They're getting very close - in the mid 7's now.

Mostly life has still centered around feeding them, which will be the case for many more weeks to come. But with my MIL here I've been out several times this week on my own to run some errands and even to get a pedicure with H. and a haircut yesterday!

And I've had time to read a few books. I really liked Let's Take the Long Way Home - a very well written memoir about friendship, water sports, and dog parenting. During all my hours of feeding I also listen to my pastor's podcasts which are great and < 20 minutes each.

My new workout accountability partner

2011-01-29T14:42:00.000-08:00

My 3-year old has been very interested in pregnant bellies this whole year. There have been questions about belly buttons,especially if/when they may start "sticking out," and how the babies come out. He definitely knew that the babies were out of my tummy when he saw them but has been asking me almost every day since then - "why does your stomach still stick out??" And even worse than that - "Is there another baby that's going to come out?" Hello, it's only been less than two weeks!

So today when we had some time together while the other three family members were napping, we did some exercises. We each got to pick some for the other person to do. You can see him checking out the foam roller and trying a tree pose - well a falling down tree pose since he didn't hold it more than a second or two. I also did some very short planks and very bad push-ups. Unfortunately I haven't gotten out to walk again in the last few days but am going to try for tomorrow.

Sorry G. - you've been temporarily displaced!

The girls are still doing well and are just about back at their birth weight. We have had SO much help this week from friends stopping by with food and offering to take Bubby out on playdates. It's given me enough time and enough of a mental break to think about things like moving Bubby to the next class in his bilingual preschool, which we may start to try next week. Btw, every new mom seems to remember their first excursion out of the house not counting the doctor's office. My first two were to Trader Joes and the preschool to figure out the class transition thing. Anyway, more on the class change and bilingual / language immersion topic later.

New arrivals and new blog name!

2011-01-26T12:08:00.000-08:00

Well the waiting didn't last long since the girls arrived last week! I was very thankful to make it to 37 weeks with twins and had an easy labor and delivery. It was < 5 hours, I was already fully dilated upon arriving at the hospital, and they both stayed head down so I didn't need a c-section.

It has been a blur of days since then, but we've also settled into somewhat of a routine. The other day my friend was commenting that after her baby was born all that existed in her world was the three of them. That's pretty much what it was like for us after Bubby was born. We did have multiple visits from both our parents (before my parents moved out here) but K took a 6-week paternity leave and it was mostly the three of us and Copper for that period. Now our world is the five of us, plus our dogs Nikko and Selena, my parents who come by daily, our fabulous night nanny/doula 4x a week, and our college-aged family friend who is a doula-in-training and comes 3 afternoons a week. It has allowed K to start working again this week and me to still do other things besides feeding the babies like spend time with Bubby, play with the dogs, and take walks. I've taken two 40-minute walks the last two days in the amazing sunshine we're having right now!

This is also largely because we've been blessed with two babies whose schedules are in sync right now. I tried out the tandem nursing a few times and while it worked okay, I didn't really enjoy it as much since I like spending some time with each of the girls separately. They seem to be pretty efficient at nursing so the total time I'm spending is not that much more than I did with Bubby. And then they sleep 90% of the remaining time (well one seems closer to sleeping 99% of the remaining time). I'm also feeling okay this time around about doing some combination of nursing and formula, especially since they are on the small side. One is just getting back to 5 lb again after her initial weight drop.

My new blog name was inspired by a favorite writer of mine - Henri Nouwen - and obviously a refocusing of things with our big life changes. When I started this blog years ago I was thinking that the focus would mostly be on fitness and triathlon training with other random life events included. It turned out to be a bit of everything and I never really got fully back into the triathlon scene. There's no one community now that I feel primarily associated with (e.g. triathletes versus twin parents) so it's still going to be a bit of everything. I do really care about fitness and am excited to get back into the swing of things.

And I'm happy to say on the topic of fitness that for years I've hoped for K (my hubby) to get into a good exercise routine besides the 2-3 years that he did a lot of road biking with me. So a month before the girls came we joined our local gym. They also happen to have an evening masters swim group that will hopefully work out for me. But K seems to have found his own exercise routine of going 2-3x a week and doing some spinning or treadmill and weights. I was hoping he had established it enough to keep going after the chaos descended. Yesterday we were having a relatively peaceful afternoon together and he asked when I thought he should target going to the gym. We had just finished a feeding so I looked at the clock and said - well if you go RIGHT NOW we can probably survive on our own until you get back. And we did! It was a nice milestone for both of us. I think everyone (including me) has been afraid to leave me on my own with the girls in case things were to go crazy and cause me to want to abandon the whole twin parenting thing. But so far so good....

The waiting period

2011-01-17T20:33:00.000-08:00

I've actually had more time with this pregnancy than the last one after I took off work. I thought the girls would arrive around the holidays and that I wouldn't even go in for my last week of work. Now it's the start of the second week of my leave that I never expected to have. By mid-last week my co-workers were asking me to please stop checking my email! I was telling K that without working or being able to workout and my son being in preschool, I feel like I've become a lady of leisure. I've been reading a lot, meeting up with friends, and starting to paint the mural that I wasn't planning to start until the end of my leave. Here's a preview - it's about halfway done.

I discovered that I had the book Jane Austen Book Club on my shelf and finally read it. For being a big Austen fan, I can't believe I waited this long. It was a really fun read.

I've also done some productive things like finding a tax accountant and trying a new vet to get a second opinion on some of my lab Nikko's chronic issues with her leg and GI stuff.

A year later...

2011-01-15T21:34:00.000-08:00

I know it's been over a year since I've posted a blog entry. I honestly didn't think I'd be back but I think it's a combination of nostalgia from looking at my old posts written right after Bubby was born and getting ready for the new additions (yes, TWO babies) due anytime now that's making me want to document things again. Somehow the FB updates and my online baby journals aren't the same. And I have a lot of free time on my hands since I thought the girls would be here by now! And I'm wondering how much harder it will be to leave the house this time after they're born and even contemplate getting back in shape. I do really miss running and have had dreams about it several times. I guess we'll see in the upcoming months!!

Eve

2009-12-28T12:09:00.000-08:00

I decided to wait until I really missed blogging to write again, and that day was today. I missed updating on 3 running races I did in November. First there was the 17k trail run, with which I reached my goal of doing a race that I wasn't sure I could finish. The 2700 ft climbing made it more of a hike/run. The whole thing took us 2:50. It was a figure eight course, and when we reached the rest stop after the first loop I briefly considered turning back with all the 11k racers. But we finished and enjoyed some great views, and I was glad we did it.

Then I had another 3.2 mile race at work a week later and a turkey trot 5k on Thanksgiving day. That race had 10,000 people in it!!! I couldn't believe it. The fun part was that they started the 5k and 10k at the same time so my training buddy P and I ran a lot of it together since our goal pace was similar. I was about 30 sec slower than the Trailblazer 5k back in Sept but that was okay considering the congested start.

Since then I've been slacking off and giving myself a rest. I've occasionally been running and sometimes throw in a few push-ups. Sometime last month I also reached one of my goals of being able to bench press two sets using the 30lb dumbbells, which are the lightest ones on the "big rack" at the gym. There's the small and the big rack, and I've been wanting to graduate for a while. :)

So I'm now on my vacation week and enjoying it thoroughly. I know stay-at-home moms will probably roll their eyes at this, but this is the longest stretch of time I've been at home with Bubby where we haven't been traveling (since maternity leave of course). So it is exhausting at times, e.g. today in the last 6 hours we've already done a dozen different activities, gone out to do errands, and I "cooked" two meals. But I'm trying to take advantage of it. We made a trip to a kids museum which he loved. You can see in the pic he was concentrating really hard at a table with various switches. Yesterday we all went to the dog park and he felt like he was in charge of the water station. Today we went to the car wash and pet store, and tomorrow we may do another museum. I've been rewarded with him starting to shift his preference ever so slightly away from daddy. I mean, daddy's still the favorite, but not by a mile anymore, and I've been getting a lot of spontaneous hugs too.

He also just turned two, and he talks up a storm, so we've been having some fun discussions. A few days ago in the car he heard some Christmas carols, then said "Happy Birthday baby Jesus!" He also spent a few days saying "Eve don't come inside" and I had no idea what he was talking about. Then we realized he was referring to the story of Adam and Eve in Genesis, but he was calling the snake "Eve" and was thinking it/she lived outside in our yard. It took a while to convince him that Eve was the nice lady with the flower in her hair and the snake is now referred to as the "sneaky snake" and that we definitely wouldn't allow any snakes in our house. This is the first time he has seemed afraid of something too. It's a little hard not to laugh at times.

Other funny things he says now:

"How about..." (if you ask him to do something and he would rather do something else)
"Thomas tank engine in dvd player"
"no like that one song" (when he wants you to switch songs)
"What that man doing??"
"All done driving" "go that way" "back to my new house"
The ABC song emphasizing "next time won't you sing with me"

And of course there's a lot of random, high-pitched screaming and general 2-year old behavior.

Running workouts leading up to the trail run

2009-11-11T15:41:00.000-08:00

I've put in a few noteworthy runs this week. On Sunday G and I went to Rancho and did one of the longer trails that I had never tried before. It was probably 9.5 - 10 miles for me (11 for him since he doubled back for me a few times) and > 1600 ft climbing. I was soooo slow going up the hills that the whole thing took about 1 hour 50 min. But it was a beautiful day, perfect running weather, and we saw some nice views. Oh, and two deer. But no rattlesnakes or lions.

Then I was too busy the next two days to get any running in. Today I made myself go to the gym at lunch and did maybe only the 3rd interval workout I've ever done on a treadmill (ugh). I decided what to do as I went along, especially when I realized mile intervals were too boring.

Warm-up
1 mile at 8:00 pace
rest 2 min (walk)
1/2 mile at 7:45 pace
rest 2 min
1/2 mile at 7:35 pace
rest 2 min
1/2 mile at 7:30 pace
rest 2 min
1/2 mile at 7:25 pace

Then LOTS of rolling and stretching. I noticed my hip flexors were still a tiny bit sore from Sunday's run.

So I have one more easy run tomorrow, then resting Friday before the trail run Saturday. On Sunday I'm going to a 5/10k to officially cheerlead and watch my godson and his brother while his parents run.

Silliness

2009-11-04T21:53:00.000-08:00

There is a lot of silliness around here these days. Bubby can carry on short conversations with me now so the ride home is always fun (when he's not tired and cranky that is). Here are some examples of the entertainment he provides:

He loves to sing ABC but he frequently jumps from "Abc..." right to "next time won't you sing with me!" Then he requests that I play the Abc song on his CD repeatedly even though there are 33 other songs to choose from.

Dad has taught him to say to people when they leave "See you! Wouldn't want to be you!" although he's a bit more polite and usually says "See you! Wanna be you!"

Also he really likes making silly faces (stretching out his cheeks with his fingers...who taught him that?) and then he asks me to turn around and say "Boo!" to him when he's doing it.

When you ask him how old he is he'll say "almost two" although some days he changes his mind and says "almost three!"

He was a monkey for Halloween, which seemed really appropriate.

Everything else has been going well too. I've kept up some semblance of running although the last week or so has been very busy. I signed up for a 17k trail run (with 2000 ft elevation) in a week and a half. While it has motivated me to do a few longer runs, I should have done a lot more training by now. I've done a few hilly 5-milers and then a 7-mile on a flat trail with my dog last weekend. Although unfortunately I had to walk one mile in the middle of that due to knee pain, so I've been stretching a LOT on my foam roller since then. I brought my shorter foam roller into work today to introduce to some people who also have knee pain and have never experienced the wonders of the roller.

We also celebrated our 10-year anniversary in Half Moon Bay. Unfortunately K was a bit under the weather, so it was a pretty restful and quiet weekend. Otherwise we could have biked 7 miles along the coastal trail and checked out whether anyone was surfing at Mavericks. But I did get to enjoy sitting by the firepit on our patio watching the fog roll in, which was lovely.

Trailblazer 5k Results

2009-09-27T22:55:00.000-07:00

Well, apparently I have some competitive juices after all. I had felt a little antsy going into the race since I knew I was going to try and push a little harder than usual. So this morning we all made it to the race, including Bubby in his BOB with my mother-in-law ready to push him on the 5k walk. We met up with the boys from work who were doing the 10k and my friend doing her first 5k. After the boys started their race it felt like forever to wait the 15 min for the race to start. I positioned myself with the 8-minute milers.

It's a small race so it spread out pretty quickly. I reached the Mile 1 marker at 8:00 (although the race volunteer said 7:50) and realized I felt tired, but not terrible. I realized that if I stayed at that pace for mile 2 and slowed down a little at the end I could pretty easily hit my goal. Mile 2 was fun since it had a small loop and then we started back so I could see other runners coming out. My split on mile 2 was 7:45. Then I definitely started feeling really tired and not caring that a few people were passing me, although at least two of them looked younger, not in my age group (yes, I must have been feeling competitive that I even looked to see how old they were). I finished the last 1.1 mile in 8:31 for a total of 24.18, which is a 7:50 pace!!! I really didn't know I had that in me. I mean, maybe once I ran around that pace for the first half of a 10k but then started fading out so I had always remembered racing at a slower place.

I did not place in my age group since the runners this year were faster, but I'm happier to get a PR than place at 27+ minutes like I did last year. I'm actually not sure what place I was since the results aren't posted yet.

I spent the rest of the day going to lunch with my mom-in-law, taking a nice afternoon nap, swimming with Bubby and Selena in our pool, and having dinner at my parents'. It couldn't get much more relaxing than that.

Dogs and fall races

2009-09-25T22:44:00.000-07:00

Okay, I figured at this point some of you are seeing occasional updates from me on Facebook, and while I'm not great at updating that either you may know we adopted two dogs! They both came from a lab rescue organization and once we saw them, we had to take both. Selena is the 2-year old curly-coated retriever and Nikko is the 1-year old black lab. We've had them about 3 weeks and it's going well so far. They're both pretty good runners, although Selena is not well behaved on the leash at all and needs a lot of training! She is a fabulous swimmer and very agile, which she demonstrates by walking along the perimeter of our hot tub which is a weird square shape and only 4-inch wide. They play together really well, meaning that Nikko loves to play with Selena, and Selena tolerates it, and at least they don't show any aggression at all towards each other. It has been great adjusting back to life with dogs.

The end of our summer was packed with visitors. We had a great time inviting people over for countless swim afternoons and bbq's. Then in August we took a two week trip to Hawaii, five days in Maui and a week in Kauai. It was super relaxing and we enjoyed having my parents with us.

Two weeks ago we had the Pacific Grove triathlon, in which I did the swim leg of a relay with my hubby and old tri buddy J. The boys that I've trained with all year were on another relay team. It was a very tough race for me. The water temp was in the mid 50s and I wore my sleeveless wetsuit since I thought it would be easier on my arms given my marginal swim training this year. Well I overestimated my body's ability to warm up, and the colder I felt, the slower I swam. It took me 45 min to swim < 1 mile, which is about 3 min/mile pace. I'm not sure I would even call it swimming, but somehow I did make it through. It took me about 10-15 minutes afterward to begin to warm up. My friend K had to strip off all my layers, put on several jackets, give me a cup of tea, and finally I started to feel normal again. I did enjoy the rest of the race day though.

And what it did for me was motivate me to run harder, since I felt grateful that there is an event that I am much better at than swimming! So I have the 5k Trailblazer Run on Sunday that I'm trying to do every year now. Last year I did it in the high 28 min range. This year I would love to be low 26 min. Also, I found out later that I was 3rd in my AG last year but didn't know it until afterward since they made some changes. I would love to officially place in my AG this time and not find out a year later! Now that I've said this I'll have to come back soon and provide a post-race update!

July summary - where to begin?

2009-07-29T06:20:00.000-07:00

I know it's always easy to say this, but this month I truly had almost no time to even think about updating the blog. I hope this will be my longest hiatus for a while. A LOT has happened.

First of all, we moved! I'm usually in denial about the moving process, so I don't do a great job of updating people throughout and I'm sure I'll surprise a lot of our friends when I send out the email with our new address (which I have yet to do). We were able to buy the house, sell ours, close both at the same time, and move - all within 2 months. It's a lovely home a mile away from my parents in a quiet neighborhood. And one of the best parts is the gorgeous backyard pool! It's 12 yds long for those of you lap swimmers who are wondering, and I can actually do some minimal training there but more relaxing and playing with the kiddo. We've been in it almost every day since we've moved. My husband's two youngest sisters were out here for two and a half weeks during our move process helping us out hugely, so we're somewhat settled in already.

And they are very active too so I got them to join for two races the past two weekends! We did the same sprint triathlon again (as I did in June) but as a relay. One of them was the second woman out of the water! I did the bike in 34 min instead of 36 min (in June) for ~11 miles so I came very, very close to hitting 19mph average. Although I hadn't been on my bike the whole month, the winds were a bit favorable this time. It was also very different since I usually pass people on the bike (due to being in the far back from the swim) and this time I got passed a lot, but the roads were a lot more open which was not a bad tradeoff. My other sis had a good run, so overall it was a great day and much speedier race than I usually have!

Then last weekend we did a 1.2 mile open water swim together. They are both swimmers so they did great in their age group, placing 5th and 10th. It was good motivation for me to get up to that distance, even though I was super slow - 55 min, but I took it easy and was glad to get out there. I did a few masters workouts and one swim in my pool for 100 laps (= 1200 yds).

Somewhere in the middle I did my first climb on my "new" bike (meaning the one I've had for 2 years now). We went up OLH, ~3 miles of a windy but pretty road. It didn't feel that much different in a double, although I certainly felt my lack of hill training over the recent years.

And I can't not update about Bubby, since things are constantly changing with him. He is just a very funny, chatty little man who has a lot to say about our "new house" (which he announces every day pulling into the driveway) and "broken trees" (which we saw fallen down in the Redwood forest). I can't wait to go on vacation next month (for 2 weeks in Maui and Kauai!!!) so I can spend some more quality time with him.

Hopefully I'll be back to update again soon!

Bubby's words

2009-06-24T22:05:00.000-07:00

At 15 months his favorite words were:

ball
door
daddy
mommy
hi
bye
uh-oh
shoe
book
mey (for more)
pees (for please)
cheese
flower
cracker
no
baby
paper
car
girl
star
boon (for balloon)
dog
po-po (for grandma)
gong-gong (for grandpa)
Copper
Jesus
yogurt

He just had his 18 month check-up this week and now his additional words/phrases are:

hi people
hi bubble, bye bubble
big bus
big car
mo-tee-ta-ta (for motorcycle)
boat
train
mommy's car (which he calls every SUV he sees)
daddy's truck
mommy's glasses, ah gong's glasses
mommy's shoes (when he got his first pair of nikes! how cute is that??)
hat
bear
monkey
yah-yoh (means water), my yah-yoh, mommy's yah-yoh
nuk (means milk)
apple
yah-cho (means sausage)
boy
house
doggie's house
chair
ah-gong's sweetie, po-po's sweetie, mommy's sweetie, daddy's sweetie
dirty sock
bath
eyes
nose
teeth
bobby (for belly button)
bye joo-jee (for our neighbors)
Kookie (for Kirbie, our neighbors dog)
Maisy
names of all his friends at school and teachers - esp his best girl "mina"
"a" and "o" although he gets them confused :)

Yes, he's quite chatty. Given the theme of his recent words and interests, I'm going to paint him a mural in his new room with a train, bus, mo-tee-ta-ta, daddy's truck, and an airplane.

Sprint tri results

2009-06-20T20:20:00.000-07:00

We did our tri today! It was a great day. We started out at 5:30 bright and early. My friend G was ready. I kind of felt all day that it was more his race since it was his first one. I picked him up and he had eaten nothing and said there was no food in his house (how is this possible?) so it was a good thing I had brought him some of my race day wheat toast peanut butter and banana sandwiches. Yum!

So let me first say that G did fabulous. There are no official results in this race, but he was likely 1st or 2nd in his age group (and by age group this is men < 40). There was an elite wave that went first, and he started 5 min later and passed some of them but didn't get passed by anyone. I was super proud of him. We're going to be back in July and he's going to start in the elite wave so we can really see what he can do!

My race was okay...honestly I can't say that it was great. The swim felt very crowded. I usually start near the back, and this was one of the first times I wish I had started closer to the middle. Several times I looked around and everyone around me was breast-stroking, and it was hard to get around them! So I just took it easy. It was pretty relaxing, as I usually like it.

The only part of the day where I felt like I was racing hard was the first half of the bike. I passed a bunch of people. But then it got pretty windy, and after I slowed down, it was hard to pick it up again. Then on the turnaround, which is a tight turn on a narrow 2-lane street, I almost got hit by a guy going the wrong way! He was literally on the wrong side of the street and kept veering towards me (and cursing, as he was obviously having some kind of problem, like maybe not knowing how to ride a bike??) and I swerved onto the gravel shoulder but didn't fall off.

The run was leisurely. It's a moderately hilly dirt course which is almost the exact same terrain that we run on at lunchtime, so it felt comfortable. My time was 3 min slower than my 5k last week - yikes! I don't feel bad about my time since I have a lot less time to train now than I did 4 years ago, but I did feel a little bad that my training partner worked so much harder out there than I did.

Here were my splits -

Swim 400 yd: 9:38 (2:25 min/100)
T1: 2:44
Bike 11 mi: 36:42 (18 mph)
T2: 1:29
Run 3.1 mi: 29:49 (9:37 min/mi)
total: 1:20

Anyway, I'm not sure if I'll do the same race again in July but I will definitely be there to cheer my buddies on.

And Bubby has been great these few days. He's sleeping well and we've been having some nice bonding time together. I literally don't know how single parents do it. Today after the tri I went home to relieve my parents, had a friend visit us for lunch, took Bubby to swim class, then dinner at my parents, and home to bed. And in between there was laundry, dishes, taking out the trash, sweeping the floor, returning a few phone calls, and packing a few boxes for our upcoming move. More on that later!

Tour de Cure 2009

2009-06-16T21:22:00.000-07:00

We had a great ride on Sunday! I wasn't sure if K would be joining me since he had zero training and Bubby's sleep schedule had gotten so bad lately it was throwing us off. On the way there we were still discussing whether to do the 50k or 75k.

But we ended up having a really fun time riding with the boys I workout with, hubby, my boss, and one other co-worker (who was the best one for me to draft off of since we were around the same pace and he always seemed to know when I needed a little tow). There were a few small bumps which made the last 10 miles or so quite tiring. But we finished 45 miles in pretty good time. And the weather was perfect - my absolute favorite riding weather - low to mid 60s.

The other thing going on lately has been Bubby's sleeping. I totally took it for granted that he slept with no problems at all the last 6 months or more, going down easily at 7:30-8:00pm and sleeping 12 hours straight. After we kept him up late several nights last week, coupled with getting a mild cold/congestion and possible teething, he became the boy that would not go down to bed. Some nights it takes us hours and he finally goes down around 10 or 11. I braced myself for the worst tonight since it is actually the very first night he and I have been on our own. But he was a little angel tonight and went down at 7:45 without a peep...hopefully I'm not speaking too soon.

Now I get to look forward to one more easy swim tomorrow and then two days of tapering before Saturday's sprint tri! So far this has been a good taper week - we did an easy (but hilly) run on Monday and then a short 50 min ride today. But one thing not helping me is that I've eaten a grand total of 7 cupcakes (yes, you read that correctly) in the last 2 days since my friend J brought them over last night and they are fabulous!! :)

A Big Boy and a 5k

2009-06-13T08:50:00.000-07:00

It's been a super busy week with end of the year activities and receptions for K's work. In between I had a morning at home with Bubby and took him to get his first professional haircut! He had a good time since it was a kids haircut place with cool cars to sit in and videos to watch. And I thought they did a nice job, but where did my baby go??

This week we had another 10k relay at work. My friend and I split it and each ran 5k. I had hoped for < 27 min and ran a 26:52! It felt pretty good and I actually had a little energy left over.

My sprint tri training is going as well as can be expected. The last few weeks we had a training plan that we stuck to fairly well. I actually got in the pool twice this last week and am feeling comfortable again. Except for a near altercation I got into yesterday, when there was a slower lady in my lane that I passed a few times (okay, this is highly unusual since I'm usually right there with the slowest swimmers). On the last pass, it was near the end of the lane, so I moved to the left of her and just turned there. She actually stuck her arm out in front of me so that I ran into it so she could stop me to say "you're not supposed to block people!" I was so focused on finishing my 400m that I just gave her a look and kept swimming, then I moved over to another lane. I just couldn't believe she perceived my passing as blocking her when she was so much slower!

Tomorrow we have our annual Tour de Cure ride again. Thanks to all my friends and family who had donated faithfully every year to this cause to support me. I'm going to try and ride the 75k which will be a stretch since my biking has been more consistent this season but not long at all - I think my longest ride has been 21-22 miles so this will be more than twice that.

Park City getaway

2009-05-28T22:08:00.000-07:00

Last weekend we had a perfect little getaway to Park City to visit K's best friend from college and his girlfriend who have a weekend place there. We stayed at their fabulous house right by Main St, mountain biked (my first time!), watched movies, shopped, and relaxed. Obviously Bubby wasn't there since we couldn't have done many of these things with him in tow. He had a good time at home with my parents. I got a few "Hi Mommy!"s when I called home...too cute.

Mountain biking was really fun. I honestly wasn't sure that I would ever try it, but it was great to get up in the hills with the pretty views (and snow capped mountains in the background!) and coming down was only a little scary. And we got in some significant climbing work too. One of our rides was 2.5 hours. The next day we rode around town but went up some hills on which I was glad to have the low gears on the mountain bike (since I have a double on my road bike and miss the granny gear) but it was soooo slow and inefficient. I would definitely mountain bike again but maybe not around here since I don't have any of the gear.

The only downside to the weekend away was that Bubby developed a screaming habit while we were away. We're trying to figure out the cause of it. Most of the time he actually seems pretty happy when he screams, but it's not clear whether he understands that he's really not supposed to do it (that long or that loudly). Once it was in the car when I turned on the music and he seemed to want to sing, but he can't sing yet. But it's very painful to listen to him scream and he has received his first few timeouts because of it!

So I signed up for the sprint triathlon and it's now only a month away. Training is going okay, actually better than last year. I've been running a few times a week and biking at least once. Today at lunch we got in our usual 15 miles or so. I also have the Tour de Cure ride again in mid June and this year and I'm training for the 75k but may do the family ride with the kid instead.

I hope everyone is enjoying the warm training weather. The one thing that bothers me is that it's still early in the summer training season and I already feel like I'm getting too much sun (I'm about 20 shades darker than my child who has "undamaged" skin. Sunblock always wears off and I never reapply while I'm out. I guess I need to improve that habit.

Bye Bye Bike...

2009-05-10T09:02:00.000-07:00

We've been doing great. Just some highlights from the last few weeks:

Bubby loves his swim class. We went yesterday and there were some older kids in the class. He finally started kicking and floating a bit. And he loves having his head submerged even though he hasn't figured out to keep his mouth closed. He's always smiling and laughing and taking in water, but apparently it doesn't bother him! He's also doing new things every day. Recently he has wanted to pick up multiple big bouncy balls at the same time and he's so thrilled with himself with he succeeds. I guess he likes challenges!

I've been riding semi-regularly, at least once during the week at lunch 10-15 miles and some saturdays. Yesterday we did a 20-miler with a bunch of hills. I've found a good home for my first road bike. One of the boys I workout with has been riding it and has decided he wants it. I could use the extra space in my garage since it's basically been sitting the last two years but I still feel an unexpected sentimental twinge since it was my first road bike and I did put 3000+ miles on it. It'll be a while before I take my current bike out on some of those same longer adventures I did with the first one.

I've been working out regularly 4-5 times a week. Last weekend I even went swimming!

I'm having the most relaxing Mother's Day ever...the boys are concocting something in the kitchen so I've been lazing around in bed and have nothing scheduled all day except for a family lunch that I'm really looking forward to with my parents, my cousin, his baby, and his parents.

Have a great Mother's Day everyone!!

Did you watch the Amazing Race?

2009-04-27T20:20:00.000-07:00

Okay, did anyone else struggle with laughing and feeling pained at the same time while watching people (try to) swim on the Amazing Race this week?

I've picked up my workouts again. Last week I lifted a few days, ran one day outside 3 miles in 90 degree weather, and rode on the new workout bikes in the gym with my friend. The bikes are networked together and we rode on the course together which was fun. Then last Saturday I did Pat's Run in honor of Pat Tillman. It was a 4.2 mile run and I honestly can't remember the last time I ran 4 miles. I think I finished in just under 40 minutes. It was a great event, with a lot of military/police/fire groups out there running together. One of them was right behind me so I heard a lot of their singing throughout the run.

The weekend before I got out for a nice 22 mile ride including some hills and even a little climbing. I've hardly done any climbing on my new bike (as in new 2 years ago) which has a double chain ring.

And today we did deadlifts, vertical rows, and shoulder lifts. The guys now feel really comfortable trying to pile on weights for me, even sneaking some on the bar when I'm not looking. After their "encouragement" I did deadlift 95 lbs, 3 sets of 5 reps. I can't believe I'm close to lifting 100 lbs in any kind of exercise!

Bubby is doing great, as always. His new thing is saying the names of all the kids in his class. He came to work one afternoon last week and seemed to be on his "big boy" behavior, eating nicely in my lap at the lunch table, and then running around saying hi to everyone in their offices. It was nice to have a little extra time with him last week. And we've partially booked our 12-day trip to Hawaii for summer...definitely something to look forward to!!

Swim class, Easter, taxes...

2009-04-15T21:09:00.000-07:00

Nothing too exciting here. I went from two good workout weeks to a bad week. I did go rock-climbing once. I'm learning to take more risks, which makes it much more fun.

Bubby is really liking his swim class. And our good friends offered to let us use their pool this summer while they're gone, so I know he'll enjoy that!

We had a very nice Easter last weekend with some family and close friends over for brunch. Of course we did our first egg hunt. I'm not sure he got the idea but he did enjoy running around the backyard with everyone else. I think we'll be spending a lot of time outside in the near future.

I'm still loving the fact that he's such a great running partner. He was in a cranky mood this afternoon when I picked him up from school, maybe because he wasn't completely awake from his nap yet. Then we got home and did our 2 mile route in the jogger, and we were both a lot happier when we got back! I've had a lot of cranky moments this week also, between running around getting our re-fi closed, having to pay a lot of taxes, etc. But in the end I'm grateful we both have jobs and that I was paid to take a 18 week maternity leave last year (which I was reminded of while doing taxes).

One of my workout buddies is trying VERY hard to convince me to do his first triathlon with him. Hmm...

2 good workout weeks

2009-04-03T09:40:00.000-07:00

I've had two consistent weeks of working out M-Th, which means I feel fine about taking a few days off over the weekend to do fun family stuff with the kid. Last Sunday we went to his first swim lesson...it was so much fun. They had us dunk their heads in, jump off a board from sitting/standing into the water, basically get used to the water. I'm still waiting to get pics from my friend.

Here are my workouts -

Last Week:
M - Ran and some weights
T - hilly interval run
W - can't remember but I think I did something!
Th - Rode 45 min at lunchtime
F and Sa - Short rides with the family, using the Burley. Bubby loved it the first time but hated it the second time!

This Week:
M - 3 sets of 10 deadlifts with 40 lb, 3 sets of 10 overhead squats with 30 lb, 3 sets of 10 shoulder presses with 17.5 lb dumbbells, 1 mile on treadmill at 8:34 min/mile pace (fast for me these days)
T - Ran 2 miles with Bubby in jogger
W - 3.5 mile jog with ~1 mile walk since I didn't feel well in the middle
Th - Rode 50 min at lunch with the boys

I was motivated to train more for a 5k run this weekend but am not sure I'm going to do it now since our schedule has become pretty packed. But if we don't do this one, I'll keep getting into running shape for something else this spring.

St Paddy's Recap

2009-03-24T16:31:00.000-07:00

St. Patrick's Day in Dublin was great. We went to a parade which was very family friendly. The people there are soooo nice! And everyone had hats on, so we had to get some too. I also learned there are 1700 pubs in the Dublin area. And all of them seemed to be full every single night! They know how to have a good time there. Other than enjoying the holiday and going to pubs, we did get a little bit of work done. I never made it back to the gym though. And by the end of the week I was ready to come home!

I've had a good workout week so far with two lunchtime workouts with the guys. Yesterday I did a little running and then weights - shoulders, tris, delts. Today we did a slightly hilly interval run. It was an odd distance, 2/3 mile. There is no way I can keep up with the guys when I'm not really in running shape. I ended up doing 3 loops - 6:00, 5:20, 5:45. With 1 min rest in between. The two fastest guys did their last lap in 4 min or so. I'm doing another fun 5k run in less than 2 weeks.

Does he really not miss me at all??

2009-03-17T02:41:00.000-07:00

I'm in Dublin this week, actually on a business trip right in the middle of all the St. Patrick's Day festivities! I'm sure I'll have some fun pictures to post later.

Clearly Bubby doesn't miss me too much, or he's having way too much fun to notice, as evidenced in this photo from yesterday.

After a tiring trip out here and a full day of work, I had a very restful evening and woke up early enough to check out the gym. It's actually a full gym that local folks can join. I felt right at home. It looked a lot like my gym at work, and the rowing machine was exactly the same! I did a warm-up row and then 15 min run. I was really confused by why I seemed to be so much faster than usual. I had almost convinced myself it was my Nike Free shoes (that I bring while traveling) that had me light on my toes, and then I realized the machine was in km/hour, not mile/hour! Duh.

What I've Been Doing the Last Month

2009-03-08T12:13:00.000-07:00

I've gotten so far behind in blogging that the last week I've been tempted to just post an entry saying I'm not going to update this for a while. But I guess part of me isn't ready to do that yet, and I would miss all of you.

So here are the highlights from the last month, the recent ones which may help explain my lack of entries:

I'm still working out but only a few times a week on average. I enjoy bootcamp when I go, so at least I'm keeping up with the running, sit-up, and push-up routine. All the basics.

The guys at the gym are tired of my myriad of excuses for not joining them for weeks. At this point I'm a little afraid to go back to bench-press, squatting, clean-and-press routine. Although I miss it.

I'm moving forward with reading through the books of the Bible. I finished Matthew and half of Exodus, so I should post my thoughts on those soon.
I'm still reading quite a bit in general and will be hosting my book club this afternoon.

Two weeks ago I was traveling for work and completely exhausted after that, from our daily schedule of getting up early, running around all day, and staying up very late catching up on email. I got to see Bubby on webcam twice a day, which was fun. He tried to feed me animal crackers through the screen!

He's walking now, and babbling a lot. A very sweet kid.

The day I came home from my trip I found out a close friend of ours was in critical condition in the hospital and a few days later he passed away. We spent last week with their family helping to make the arrangements. His service was very uplifting, much more a celebration of life than a solemn gathering. We'll miss him a lot.

My oldest friend that I've known since 5th grade was visiting us with her family this weekend, so it was really great and restful to hang out with them.

I'm leaning towards renaming this blog "real life fitness."

That's it for now...I'll try to post more later this week.

The fear of the fall

2009-02-07T07:55:00.000-08:00

I just got back from my work group's annual trip to Tahoe. We were on the Nevada border in a casino hotel and had a fun time, although I realized I went for a whole day without going outside! My friend S and I hosted the party suite, and I think there were 50-60 people in there for our pre-party before dinner and then throughout the night. I got home last night and was so excited to see my boys. When they came home, Bubby was toting a heart balloon that said "I Love You." How sweet is that??

Last week was a pretty good workout week. I went back to bootcamp on Monday and Wednesday mornings. I got a friend to come who has been wanting to get back into working out for a long time. Tuesday I ran 6 hill sprints with the boys at lunch. This hill is actually rather long, and the second part is also really steep. We were trying to do 2 sets of 4 descending in time, but I did 2 sets of 3 with erratic times - something like 1:20, 1:14, 1:28, 1:28, 1:24, 1:28. By the end of the 3rd one I was seeing stars.

Oh, and I realized something the last time I went rock-climbing (time #3 for me) about a week and a half ago. This is similar to what I've learned about myself from skiing over the years, although it really hit me during climbing. After getting to a certain skill level, I start to plateau because I don't like to take big risks when it comes to sports. In skiing, I got down a blue slope on my first day without falling. But I never progressed beyond blue. In fact, I seemed to regress over the years. It also didn't help that I only skied on average maybe 1 day per year. This hit me when K and I were both doing a few climbs. I did a 5.6 one without cheating (no touching other colors). He was working on a 5.6+ and took his first fall...of course he didn't actually fall down. But I know that I'm reluctant to take those big risks where I might fall. Although at least I'm conquering my fear of heights somewhat where it seems less scary to fall climbing than skiing. A few times I did look down and then froze up and had to come down. But I still want to keep trying to get better at it.

And then I wonder - does Bubby take after me this way? He's starting to walk a little, but he usually waits until he's very stable before trying his steps. He usually takes 4-6 but did about 10 last week chasing after his friend at school who was holding something he wanted. I'll post a walking video soon.

Anyway, I'm looking forward to a rather quiet weekend. The main event today is going to church, and we might try and put Bubby in the daycare there for the first time. Tomorrow K is shooting kids pictures. He has been re-focusing more on shooting and already has two weddings booked for September. Then we're having Copper's grandparents over for dinner since they're back from France again!

Time for a new blog name?

2009-01-26T23:08:00.000-08:00

It's been a busy few weeks. We've been traveling every weekend. After the retreat, we went down to Orange County to see my family. Then last weekend we went to Tahoe with my cousin and family. The kids had a great time together and seemed to really like each other's company. We weren't out in the snow too long though. The dads went skiing together, but by the time the kids were both done napping and bundled up to go out, it was almost 4 pm! I'm sure all you parents can relate.

I've been really busy with a project at work, which means it's even more important for me to get my workouts in. There have been days when I've told my co-workers - I haven't worked out in x days (7 at the longest stretch) and I need to get to the gym otherwise I'll be really cranky! A few days I've even gone into the gym at work in the morning since my lunchtime is getting scheduled over a lot with meetings. The guys are now onto a new weightlifting thing where they do a certain set of exercises M, W, and F and always do 5 sets of 5 reps with 5 min rest in between each set. It seems like a long rest, but it's actually quite similar to running intervals on the track. When the set is very hard, the rest time just flies by. We do this for bench press, clean and press, squat, and deadlifts. So picking the right weight is key. For bench press this seems to be 65 lbs for me now, and this morning I braved it on my own without them there to spot me.

Anyway, I'm not really feeling the motivation to train for triathlons this year, so I may just have a goal of working out most days (at least 5 days a week usually makes me happy) and then do events for fun as they come up. So the time has come for me to change this blog name, since it's really not much about triathlons at all. It's hard to say what it's really about...working out certainly, my family, friends, dogs (hopefully again someday soon), books, and some travels. I'm really not sure what to call it. If you have any ideas, please let me know. Especially some of my friends whom I know have been reading for a long time...you know why you are. :)

2 crossfit workouts and a retreat

2009-01-13T14:21:00.000-08:00

So last Wednesday I checked out my first crossfit class. It was really geared towards beginners so the instructor spent the whole first half on what the correct form is for a deadlift. Then we added in burpees, with a push-up at the bottom. So the actual workout was a ladder, starting with 10 deadlifts (with a 15 lb dumbbell - which turned out to be too light for me) and 1 burpee, then 9 deadlifts and 2 burpees, ending up with 1 deadlift and 10 burpees. It took 11 minutes and was very hard near the end. Even though that's only a total of 55 burpees and 55 deadlifts, I felt like my back was more sore than usual, even when I do more than 55 push-ups in a day.

Over the weekend we went to our annual couples retreat. We didn't decide until a week ago to go. My parents watched Bubby and had a great time with him. We enjoyed the retreat since the speakers were pretty good and we got to catch up with folks we had not seen in a long time and actually have conversations with them which lasted more than 2 minutes. We also snuck away for an evening to have dinner and see a movie in downtown Santa Cruz.

Then today one of my gym buddies and I tried the WOD (workout of the day) on the crossfit website. I did some major modifications to it and did dips off a bench instead of rings and did the power cleans with 40 lbs. My partner did actual ring dips and power cleans with 120 lbs. This took about 14 minutes. Then we did a little hill run of 15-20 minutes.

Here was the WOD with the first round removed to make it a little less crazy:
155 pound Power clean 12 reps
24 Ring dips
155 pound Power clean 9 reps
18 Ring dips
155 pound Power clean 6 reps
12 Ring dips
155 pound Power clean 3 reps
6 Ring dips

I think we'll include a weekly crossfit workout into our gym routine since it's really challenging and the variety is nice.

Happy new year's!

2009-01-01T16:52:00.000-08:00

I hope everyone had a great new year's! We've had a lovely almost two weeks off, mostly helping my parents get settled into their new house. It's been great seeing them almost every day. They can't seem to go more than a day without seeing Bubby since they miss him!

We had a nice quiet Christmas at home and brunch with our dear friends T and A and family. On Christmas morning, my little boy who usually sleeps 12 hours through, woke up at 4am. An hour later he crawled towards the pile of presents...as if he knew! I let him open one early before going back to bed. There was also a little birthday party for Bubby at school (see him trying frosting on the mini banana muffins I made!) and at home with family.

Also, it's been a great week for fun exercising. I got out on a short ride with a few hills with friends from work last Sunday. We're going to go again tomorrow and there should be a slightly bigger group. And then I finally tried rockclimbing two nights ago! It was so much more fun than I expected! I don't know if I've mentioned before that I'm very afraid of heights. So when I got there, I had no real intention of actually climbing very far up the wall. But by the third time, I got about 3/4 of the way up, and I knew I was committed, so I made it to the top of my first 5.1. Then later in the evening I tried a 5.3 and a 5.6, which took quite a bit of effort to make it to the top. But it was fun and definitely less scary each time. I didn't once look down, except far enough to see my footholds. I think I'm going to get K to go since I know he would enjoy it.

It's also made me think that I need to try some new workouts or sports. I've been somewhat ambivalent about real triathlon training the last two years, and I can't blame all of that on having the baby. I'm seriously thinking of trying out Crossfit since it incorporates a lot of elements I've been doing more of the last year, namely bootcamp and weightlifting, but still includes some fairly intense running. There are two gyms near by here and I'm going to try and check them out in January.

I think I'll also do some running races in 2009, cycle for fun whenever I can, and only swim if my friends really are serious about doing Alcatraz. I want to do that swim again at least once in my life but it doesn't have to be this year!

Getting into vacation mode

2008-12-23T19:28:00.000-08:00

I've been feeling like I want to blog more but don't have any particularly interesting subjects. There has been a lot going on though.

On the workout front I once again did not complete the December fitness challenges, but I had a few weeks that were pretty regular. I usually made it to the gym 2x a week on average and kept up with the Thursday running group. One day I did 7 sets of 10 push-ups and didn't feel too sore afterwards. I'm now off work for about two weeks and thought about going to boot camp but they're taking a break right now...bad timing!

Bubby's doing great. He just turned a year old. He's cruising a lot and standing. He just learned "touchdown" so I'll have to post a video soon.

Which is somewhat related to the update on my parents finally moving out here! (The connection is that my dad really likes football so now Bubby has more opportunities to watch football with the guys.) They've been staying with us while waiting for their stuff to get here. It's been great watching them interact with Bubby, and of course having breakfast made every morning (in addition to dinner most days) is amazing.

I'm hoping to workout a lot during the break, help my parents move, and catch up with old friends. And maybe get on my bike once or twice.

Where's Bubby?

2008-12-09T22:11:00.000-08:00

Here's the Thanksgiving picture I promised, with Bubby and all his cousins. Can you find him?

And today we had our 5k at work. I ran just about the same time as I did the last one - around 29 minutes, although this time I didn't have the baby jogger. I do still have a bit of my cold, though, and given the little running I've done this month I thought it went okay.

Notes on Genesis

2008-12-07T15:24:00.000-08:00

I got so far behind in blogging and was also low on energy for the last two weeks due to sickness that I just gave up for a while. But one thing I've been wanting to do is share some of my thoughts as I read through the Bible again. It's been a long time since I've read it completely through, so I thought it would be interesting to share at the end of each book the insights I've gotten and see if anyone else has thoughts to add (or better yet, wants to read along with me). The last few weeks I've been reading Genesis. I'm going to alternate books of the old and new testaments. These are some of the things that struck me:

- The naming of the animals (Chapter 2): This seems to be very significant. I wonder why naming was necessary. Although it also seems that naming led to the conclusion that there was no suitable partner for Adam and that he needed one. At least in English it says "no suitable partner was found," but it's not as if there was a search for one.

- The call of Abram - "I will make you into a great nation" (Chapter 12): In this passage God says "I will" five times, "you will" one time, and "will be" one time. I think the emphasis is on the fact that a blessing from God is more about what he will do than what we will do or what we will receive.

- Isaac and Ishmael bury Abraham (Chapter 25): It's nice to see that they buried their father together after all the family drama of Sarah and Hagar birthing rival sons. It seems like there was reconciliation.

- Listing of Jacob's descendants (Chapter 46): Of the 70 children and grandchildren listed, there are only 2 women! At first I thought this was because it was only intended to be a partial list, but it does say "the members of Jacob's family were seventy in all." Doesn't that seem very strange?

I'll update more this week on workouts, my parents making the big move out here this week, and a fun where's-Bubby-in-the-Thanksgiving-crowd picture. Right now I hear him waking up so I'm going to incorporate a 2-mile jog with him to get my groceries (it's 1 mile each way). We have another 5k run this Tuesday at lunch and I'm in no way ready for it.

What's a Dit Dat?

2008-11-16T21:41:00.000-08:00

Bubby has been joyfully babbling all weekend, but we have no idea why he makes he sounds that he does. I had blogged earlier that he still says "nnn, nnn, nnn" for dogs, whether he sees a picture of one or hears one barking. He has been saying "ball" and "bye" for a while. But this weekend he moved onto two syllables. Of all the random things, K has been trying to teach him "magnet" since his new favorite thing is a wooden pineapple magnet. Although I argued that it might be more intuitive for him if we just called it a pineapple, not that that's easy to pronounce, but magnetism is a rather complex principle for an 11-month old. Although we did take it into our bathtub with us and stuck it onto the kitchen stools. But he really wants to call it a "dit dat." He has probably repeated that hundreds of times this weekend, not just in identifying the pineapple magnet but in general conversation. And he is a pretty joyful kid in general, shown here last week laughing away with his buddy B.

Since I always look forward to spending the whole weekend with him, I tried to incorporate him into all my weekend workouts. I was okay taking it easier since I had a good latter half of the week. This is what I did:

Wed: Leg weights, mostly squats with 45-55 lbs, and this made me VERY sore
Thr: Ran the usual ~4 mile loop with lunch group, and we may have a few dogs join us soon...yay!
Fri: The "max bench press" workout...my max is 65 lbs, sadly enough, only 5 lbs heavier than the weight I do reps at, then shoulder raises, and assisted pull-ups

Then this weekend on Saturday I went with Bubby to the park and did some push-ups, sit-ups, and ran a few laps. Today we finally got out in the Burley again! It was our second time out, after we decided to wait until he was closer to a year and could wear a helmet. Well, he definitely resisted the helmet, so we went without it just around the neighborhood. But we're going to keep trying to put it on. I'm typically like the helmet police (nagging my colleagues and my 17-yr old niece whom I just bought a bike for), so I'm not going to let my own kid ride helmet-less for long. We only went 5-6 miles but we did one big loop in our highest gears to at least get in some exercise.

Now he's been a really good baby for me, since dad went out tonight with the boys, and Bubby went right to bed at 7pm and hasn't been up crying like other nights recently (his upper teeth coming in have really been bothering him).

The new challenge

2008-11-09T12:06:00.000-08:00

I just told K that I need to post something since I've been such a blogger slacker, and he said "yeah, since people will stop reading it!" Here was our little bat on Halloween.

Life has been very fun. He's getting into everything now. He has been pulling himself up to stand for the past month, and then lately has been leaning on things without hands. Yesterday I witnessed him pushing something while taking steps for the first time. Of course, being the son of a photographer he decided to use dad's lightstand (with a tripod base)! Also, he must miss Copper since the only animal sound he makes now is for a dog, and oddly enough he says "nnn, nnn, nnn."

Also, there's a new fitness challenge going on at our gym. I forgot to blog a while back that I bailed on the previous survivor one...since the third week of that was when Coop got sick, so I just didn't feel like working out for a while. I'm not sure about this new challenge, but the guys I lift with are all going to do it. The challenge is to do the maximum number of push-ups, sit-ups, pull-ups, leg presses at 1.5x your body weight in a minute each, with one minute of rest in between. Then you run a mile (on a treadmill) as fast as you can. All of the activities are weighted equally. The good thing about doing this is that it will keep me motivated, especially to keep going with the push-ups, ab work, and running. The downside is that I'll have to work really hard to do any pull-ups or leg presses at all. The last time I tried, I couldn't do any real pull-ups, only 1 with a 25-lb assist. And I can leg press maybe 110-130 lbs, which needless to say, is not 1.5x my body weight. I think we have until the end of December to "train" for this.

Last week my workout summary was running 3.8 miles on Thursday and weightlifting (chest, shoulders, tris) on Friday. I was going to try indoor rock climbing Thursday night but my left calf felt pulled after the run.

6 days of workouts and a water hose

2008-10-22T12:51:00.000-07:00

I'm back in a workout routine. I've realized that once I expect to be working out that day, I look forward to it all morning. I've worked out every day since last Friday, so it's 6 days and counting.

Friday - 100 pull-ups (back/bi)*btw I was sore for 3 days after this!
Saturday - Run - 2 miles with Bubby in jogger
Sunday - Ride - 25 miles with friends from work on their "easy" day
Monday - Weights (chest/tri)
Tuesday - Run - 40 yard sprints on a hill and flat
Wednesday - Legs weights, push-ups/sit-ups

Bubby's doing his own thing now. His classroom actually has a blog, which is SO FUN to check out every day! I get to spy on what he does. Yesterday I picked him up and he was pant-less, and then I found this picture on the blog. I guess he was completely soaked. It's kind of nice that he does all his playing with water, mud, and sand at school and they give him back to me clean and dry. :)

Pull-ups and an interesting life illustration

2008-10-17T21:45:00.000-07:00

It definitely still feels empty in our house, like someone is missing. Since someone is missing. Especially the one who would wait for dinner to be finished, help "clean up" the floor, and sleep in the corner of our room, snoring peacefully. My cousin recommended the book The Art of Racing in the Rain, and it's helping me through this time.

I also took a pretty long break from working out. Not that I was so regular before, but I just didn't have the motivation to exercise at all for almost two weeks. By the end of this week, I'd had enough of my state of lethargy, so I went back to the gym today. I joined a group of guys that are very hardcore, and they're very focused on weight-training. As in benching 280 lbs! But they're nice enough to let me workout with them, so today we did pull-ups. I did a ladder of 1 to 10 and then back, with a 25-55 lb assist. Yes, that's 100 total. Then they moved onto rows but I had to get back to work. I'm going to be sore for sure.

Bubby is also doing pull-ups, at least to a standing position. Now he gets to see all kinds of interesting things, including what's in our pantry drawers.

The interesting life illustration has to do with an ant colony that has been living inside my favorite orchid plant for months. I've been waiting patiently for the orchid to stop blooming so I can safely repot it, but it's so hardy that it blooms most of the year. So as I write this, my hubby is working on exterminating them by flushing them out with water. The fascinating part is that first a few hundred ants came out (gross). Then the next set of ants were carrying these small white things, which upon closer inspection appear to be the larva. That actually made me feel a little bad, since the ants were trying to save their babies. And then a few minutes ago, I heard him say "there's the queen!" I went to take a look and she is HUGE...at least 3 times the size of the other ants. So I'm pretty sure they will all be flushed out soon, and won't be building any more huge extended families in there. I feel a little bad about flushing them down the drain, but I don't know any other way of doing it while keeping my favorite plant in tact.

Farewell sweet boy

2008-10-10T14:43:00.000-07:00

Some sad news from this week - and you, my blogger friends, know almost better than anyone how much this dog meant to me. We sent this email out yesterday:

We had to say goodbye to our dear yellow lab Copper today. He had been sick for several days and was not recovering. It might have been cancer, but the tests he had taken the last several times had not been clear. He had actually been sick six months ago but recovered completely. We joked that he wanted to stick around until he could benefit from Bubby eating finger foods, which did happen starting a few months ago. He also enjoyed introducing Bubby to the pool during our last family vacation with him in July.

Although we only had Copper 2.5 years (since we adopted him when he was 10 from fellow Googler and now friends of ours M and C), we enjoyed every moment. He had a sweet, gentle spirit that everyone loved. He also had his funny little quirks like posing for pictures, drinking out of faucets, and carrying his collar out when he was ready to go somewhere. We're really sad that Bubby will never get to know such a great dog.

We will miss him dearly.

Survivor Challenge

2008-10-03T14:47:00.000-07:00

I learned this week that there's a Survivor fitness challenge going on at work where you try to complete a high volume of endurance and strength activities in 4 weeks. Unfortunately, I'm off to a late start since I didn't know until week 2, and the only thing I could count from week 1 were the few running races I did. But here's the set of activities...it seems like a lot, doesn't it?

Running: 15 miles
Cycling: 45 miles
Rowing: 15,000 meters
Stairs: 300 floors
Wall Sit: 25 min
Superman: 15 min
Plank: 15 min
Push-ups: 500

All I got done this week so far is 6 miles of cycling (on a stationary bike...ugh!), 3 miles of running, 2500 m rowing, 6 min of wall sit and 8 min of plank. There's a long way to go!

Mommy and Me 5k!

2008-09-28T16:22:00.000-07:00

We did it! Bubby and I did our 5k this morning together. I woke sleepyface up at 7:15, packed up his breakfast, and headed out once friends A and N came by. We got there with plenty of time to register, put sunblock on him, and feed him the usual breakfast of yogurt and cheerios. Then running pal (and former nanny) K and cousin G came by too. These 4 have been doing all my races with me this year! We started off towards the back, but the race spread out more than I had expected, so we were able to move around easily with the jogger. I felt great, especially compared to Thursday's 2.5k run when I was winded within the first minute. We all ended up running separately for the most part, but I met some nice people out on the run. I think I picked the exact right pace for me today, since I could still hold a conversation. In the last mile, I was talking with one lady, who told me she was running "an easy pace" since she had just had a baby 2 months ago...wow!! The finish line came up faster than expected, and we were done in just over 29 minutes (9:24 min/mile)! I think Bubby had a good time, since he was quiet the first half of the run (just taking everything in) and then started babbling towards the end, but not complaining. My hubby had fixed my wheel alignment on the BOB last night, since it had been pulling to the right. Today it worked great. I felt like it was just gliding with hardly any effort on my part, even though it was loaded with random baby gear, water, and t-shirts as well as the baby, of course. I love my BOB!

Then we met up with everyone including A's son who ran the kiddie race! And to my great surprise Bubby and I came in 4/20 in my age group. And there was someone named Peter who came in first?! I've never met a woman named Peter, so maybe we were actually 3rd.

So overall we had a great time, and I think I will make this our annual run together. This was all topping off an already fun weekend. Yesterday we headed up to SF for a pre-opening BBQ for my cousin's new restaurant. Everything looked and tasted wonderful. Very cute, unpretentious decor and great seafood, especially the oyster po' boy sandwich was scrumptious. It's opening this week so go check it out if you're in the city!

Then we hung out with Bubby's cousin J who just turned 1 and got cute photos of them together!

10k relay race report, weird sinus issues, and a fun show

2008-09-26T13:35:00.000-07:00

We had our 10k relay yesterday afternoon. Due to the heat (it was 80+ degrees by mid-afternoon, not the nice cool morning weather I'm used to running races in!) our 2-person team joined up with another 2-person team so we each ran 1 leg. Somehow I got stuck running the anchor leg, since my original partner Z still wanted to run 5k so he was going to do the last leg with me. But since he was tired after his leg, he left me to run on my own. I think I started out a bit too fast. I passed some people running the individual 10k but I got passed by a lot of fast relay runners on their anchor leg. We had a good time, though. My time was 12:29. Not terrible, but I was hoping for 12 minutes. I guess you can't expect too much when you haven't done any speed work at all for more than two years! And we had a huge turnout from our group. BTW, that's Z in the pink Ciao Bella shirt!

And I wanted to ask you guys about the weird sinus issue I have whenever I do one of these lunchtime races. It's happened exactly the 3 times that we've had races here. Afterwards, I sneeze like crazy and have congestion the whole rest of the day. It's obviously an allergic reaction, but the strange thing is that it never happens when we do our lunchtime training runs. I'm guessing it's prompted by the combination of pollens plus my level of exertion.

So basically I had to carry around a box of tissues with me the rest of the day, even out to dinner and to the fun show I went to. I was invited by my blogger friend (who I was friends with before our blogs) and also got to meet her sister, another blogger acquaintance. It turned out to be a really fun day!!

5k week

2008-09-21T21:03:00.000-07:00

Last week was a pretty good transition week for us after returning from vacation. Bubby liked daycare, especially since right now there are 3 teachers for 3 kids, plus K spent a lot of time with him there too. And one of the kids is his buddy B, my friend's son. He's pretty motivated to crawl more to keep up with the older boys (who are 2 months older) and he seems to like exploring all the new things there. He's starting to become very interested in taller objects that he can turn over (like trashcans) or pieces of furniture he can pull himself up on.

Work went pretty well for me, and I squeezed in a few runs during lunchtime. I had hoped to workout most days, but I came down with a little cold midweek so I had to recover from that. This week I have two 5k runs! One Thursday we have a 10k at work, which you can do as an individual or a relay team. I'm running it as a 5k relay with a friend so I'm going to do the first two legs. Then Sunday I have the 5k that Bubby's going to do with me in his jogger, and I hope it'll become an annual event for us! I'm hoping to run the first 5k in 27 minutes and the second one with Bubby in 30-31 minutes.

A random fun thing - when we went for our walk after dinner the other night, we noticed a LOT of dogs at the park - maybe 15 or 20 of them. Apparently there's a nightly get-together half hour before sunset. It was a lot of fun, and Coop enjoyed meeting new friends.

Back from France and off to school

2008-09-14T06:27:00.001-07:00

I just got back this weekend from a blissful, relaxing vacation to see our friends H and E in the south of France. We had a great time, just like last year. Except this year Bubby came along too (well, last year he was in utero) so we stayed in one place. They were amazing hosts, as always, providing their lovely guest suite and all the amenities like crib and highchair, and we enjoyed our almost daily dinners with them from their patio overlooking the ocean. Traveling with the baby wasn't too bad either. He slept part of the time both flights in the baby bassinet, and of course smiled and flirted with all the flight attendants and nearby passengers.

Some other highlights from our trip:

o We made it to St Tropez this year. We had a nice walk, lunch, shopping, and Bubby rode his first merry-go-round.

o We walked several times along the stone path on the ocean and I jumped in while the boys watched from above!

o We went to a nice zoo where Bubby seemed to enjoy the smaller animals (llamas, baby kangeroos) more than the big guys.

o We swam every day and he LOVED it. I think we need to start a baby swim class soon or at least take him to a pool regularly.

o Just hanging out with our friends and catching up, eating a lot of yummy food, and sleeping in.

o We lessened the jetlag by keeping him on a much later schedule, so he slept at 11:30pm there instead of 7:30pm, which meant he only shifted about 4 hours, and we still had our nice evening dinners.

I took a vacation from everything - blogging, email (for the most part), and even working out. But when I got back Friday, I ended up going to do a 5k in the evening - an annual moonlight walk/run where a lot of families and dogs come out. My friend K, cousin G and I jogged the first mile, but it was too hard to weave around the walkers (and we were too tired to wait until the 8:45pm start of the actual 5k "run"), so we ended up doing half jogging and half walking. It was really a great event, though. There were at least a hundred dogs out there, who looked like they were having an absolute ball. And it kept me awake for a bit. Although at times I felt like a jogging zombie.

Then yesterday K and I went to the gym and did a little run on the treadmill, a few arm weights, push-ups, and plank.

I'm trying to get back into a routine for this week, since I'm going back to work and Bubby is starting his afternoon daycare a few days a week. I feel like he's going off to school! I think he'll have a lot of fun and great experiences there, but it's still tough to make the transition. I'm packing up his bags for school...sniff!

Starting to go places

2008-08-30T21:31:00.000-07:00

I've been a big blogger slacker! In a nutshell, I've been super busy at work, not really working out much, and watching the kiddo learn how to crawl. There's not much to say about work, except that I've gotten through a few big deliverables. But it seriously hampered my usual mid-day workouts, resulting in a grand total of ONE workout since the triathlon two weeks ago. Very sad. Okay, if you count today, I ran again with the jogger, so I guess that's TWO workouts. Bubby and I are training for the 5k we're going to run together at the end of September. And we've decided there aren't any more triathlons for this year at least.

Bubby has been learning to "crawl" in unconventional ways, like rolling around, pivoting on his tummy, or sort of sliding backwards on his tummy. This works well on hardwood floors. He's also started feeding himself cheerios and pieces of cheese. He'd love to have the cookies too, but we're not quite ready to give those to him! Copper is the truly happy one, since he's been waiting all year to help sweep up the cheerio covered floors!

Sprint tri race report

2008-08-17T08:34:00.000-07:00

I did my first triathlon in 3 years yesterday, so this is the first time I'm posting a race report on this blog! My cousin G was doing his very first tri, so it was fun to do it with him. The first thing I got to introduce him to is waking up at 4:30 in the morning, and he's not even a morning person. So by 5:30 we were on our way. We watched the sunrise from the car. Getting into the park took forever but we got there and got everything set up and even found my friend J. Do you like how we used the BBQ grill as our transition spot and laid everything out on his Corona towel from his high school days? We got a bit more organized after this picture was taken.

This is the same race I did several times back in 2004 (it's a tri for fun where they do it 3 times a year). It's a 400m swim, 11 mile ride, and 3.1 mile run. Since it's a noncompetitive tri where they don't use timing chips or give you an official time, we strategized on which heat to start with, since we all wanted to start together. So we decided to go at the back of the mens 40+ wave. I started in the very back, as always. The swim went fine. Halfway through I took in a bit of water but didn't let myself panic. I got out in 9:20, around the time it used to take me. I guess training can be overrated. I got changed into my bike gear but still didn't see G, so I went to the swim exit to wait for him, since I was a bit worried. After 5 minutes, I turned around and saw him in the transition! He had wanted to take a little break by holding onto the kayak, but didn't realize that once you do that they have to bring you in.

So then we were off on our bike ride (yes, riding together, since it's not a "real" tri, but I did explain drafting rules to him). We passed a lot of people. I convinced him to ride ahead of me. The ride was a lot of fun. It went by very quickly. I tried not to let my speed drop below 17mph except for the one little hill.

I caught J near the end and said hello. Then I found G in the transition waiting for me. Right away my right calf started cramping, so we stopped and stretched. He even tried to massage it out for me. I really wasn't mentally ready to run hard. All of my runs have been at an easy pace, so it would have taken a lot of effort to push myself into a much faster run. In the beginning I even wanted to walk a few of the hills, but we didn't. We just chatted and enjoyed being out there. The run took more than 31 min, and I used to do it in 25-27 min, but that's okay.

So in summary:

S: 9:21
T1: 8:07
B: 36:20 (18.2 mph - yay - very fast for me!)
T2: 2:25
R: 31:48

Total 1:28:03. It if weren't for the 8 min T1, I would have been close to my time I did my first race, which I trained a lot harder for. But I had a lot of fun. See how happy I look at the end? I haven't decided if I want to do one more this year...

Workout highlights - indoor and outdoor bricks

2008-08-11T10:40:00.000-07:00

Last week's workouts:

Monday - Push-ups

Tuesday - Cardio brick at the gym. I just joined my friend's workout and it turned out to be really fun. We did 15 min on the rowing machine, 15 min on the stairclimber (the one where the stairs move like a treadmill), 15 min bike, and 2 min run. I should have done 15 min run but he had to go so I got lazy and left too. It was great to do it with him since he pushed me on my speed, especially on rowing.

Wednesday - baby jogger 1 mile after work. Bubby still likes it.

Thursday - group run - 25 min. Stopped to walk after a while with a guy who is just starting to run.

Friday - off

Saturday - Brick with my cousin G who's doing his first tri this weekend! We did a transition practice in the garage where we set everything up. Then we did one lap around the block, then an hour bike ride (my first ride outside since the Sonoma weekend), then a 25 min run. Except it wasn't a real brick since I stopped for 10 min after the bike to chat with my neighbors who had just gotten back from vacation. See what my "training" is like this year?

Sunday - off

Monday - Today I went back to my masters group for the first time this year! It was fun to see everyone again. I did a 400 warm-up, then 4x75, 4x50 drill, then 3x100. Maybe only 1200 total but my arms felt like lead at the end so I got out.

In between training I've been helping my parents shop for furniture for their new house...fun! And we're planning to have a family reunion of sorts this Wednesday, since a lot of folks are unexpectedly in town around the same time.

And I'm starting to get a bit sad about Bubby growing up so fast and growing out of things that remind me of his babyhood. Like our favorite sleepsack that had dogs and cats on it. He's now in a much larger sack, not usually pj's like he's modeling here, which really make him look like a bigger boy. And he has 2 bottom teeth so the toothless grin will be gone soon.

Week 3 training and a big move coming up

2008-08-04T14:47:00.000-07:00

Last week's workout summary:

M: Elliptical 20 min, weights, push-up challenge

T: Ran 30 min outside with S., foam roller on IT bands

W: Rode on trainer 20 min, push-up challenge

Th: Ran 30 min outside with people from my work group. Actually, I started up a weekly run that I invited our whole group(40+ people) to. 7 people showed up. We all ran together at a pretty easy pace, maybe 10 min/mile. One of the gals is a running coach, so she gave some great tips to the people who are newer runners or just starting to work out. We had a great time.

F: Off, well except for the push-up challenge

Sa: Off

Su: Ran 4 miles around my neighborhood, in ~36 min so I was happy to go a bit longer and a bit faster than I have been lately. I attempted to run at my favorite park again, but the parking was absolutely crazy. I waited 15 min and couldn't find a spot. So I left and went shopping on my way home! Then I ran when I got home. From now on I'm just going to park in the neighborhood about a mile away from the park and run in. The actual trail from the parking lot in the park is boring for the first mile anyway.

Thanks for the comments from everyone on the push-ups. I had a few people check out my form, and while I'm not going to try and touch my nose to the ground (1" from the ground with elbows at 90 degrees seems like a good form check), I am working on my form. When I switched on friday to using better form, it got harder and slower. I had to do the 5th set that day on my knees (gasp!) and I couldn't do all 27. While it may feel like I'm not making great progress, I know it will help me get stronger to do fewer push-ups with better form. I'm debating whether to do week 3 again.

All in all, the week was okay. I did more running than expected, but almost no biking, and definitely no swimming! Clearly I'm going to wing the swimming portion of the triathlon which is in less than 2 weeks. Next weekend I may get to go on a weekend ride since my parents (aka babysitters!) will be in town. It's actually very exciting...they're closing escrow on a house they bought out here. I've waited years for them to be ready to move out here and now it's finally happening.

Happy 12th Birthday Copper!!

2008-08-01T21:45:00.000-07:00

Tonight we went out to a burger place that we like with very casual outdoor seating for Copper's birthday (as opposed to the other favorite burger place near our house that doesn't allow dogs on their patio...boo). Copper got some fries and lots of love from kids that were there.

Earlier in the day we went to my company's summer picnic and Bubby got to encounter a cow up close! Too bad dogs weren't allowed there either. It's a very dog friendly company, but the picnic was already so packed that it would have been crazy if everyone had brought their dogs too!

Tomorrow K is going to shoot his first wedding since Bubby was born, so we're going to have a nice girls day here (plus Bubby and Copper of course) without him. First we're going to a tea place I've been wanting to try for a long time with friend S, and then T is coming by to bake a zucchini pie and peach cobbler with us. Yum!

My sweet pooch

2008-07-30T22:21:00.000-07:00

This post is for one of my boys...the one that gets neglected the most these days. But he is such a sweetie and always reminds us of how lucky we are to have him. Especially as his 12th birthday is approaching in a few days! This photo is typical of him, watching out for the rest of us (while my other two boys are dozing here).

Tonight I was in a cranky mood when I got home from work. I was being the "cranky pants" as we sometimes call Bubby. I didn't have a really great reason to be. Yes, there were a few things at work that didn't get done today which weren't fully in my control, and a few issues that came up on my parents' home purchase. But nothing that won't get resolved. After I got home, I put Bubby to bed extra early (~6:30) since he seemed so tired, and by the time K got home I was quite cranky. But I remembered that this morning when I left for work I had told him tonight I planned to walk Coop, spin on my bike, and do the push-ups.

So Coop and I went for an evening walk, and it completely cheered me up. I had to laugh at him...he still likes to poop at the exact same house that he and our other dog used to try and mark every time. Those poor owners probably never realized our dogs were having a territorial battle on every walk right in their yard. And the memory still lives on for Coop, apparently. Then we saw our neighbors on the way home, and we chatted for a bit, and Coop got lots of hugs from their kids. And they insisted that we pick their tomatoes, cucumbers, and peaches while they're gone on vacation. Okay, you don't have to ask me twice! I love how everyone is starting to grow their own produce these days.

We got home and Coop still seemed to want to play, so he fetched the tennis ball in the backyard a few times...I recently got some fun squeeky tennis balls.

And then not only did I get on my bike to do a Spinervals workout for the first time in a year or so - I got my hubby on his too! It was short, but still a good workout. And then we repeated day 2 of week 3 of the push-ups. I barely made it.

And a question for you guys also doing the push-up challenge - do you think your chest and/or nose has to touch the ground every time when doing a push-up? I've gotten some of the guys I work out with at lunch to start the push-up challenge, and they all seem to think your chest or nose has to touch. My nose comes close but doesn't touch.

A hot day at the farm and wild arugula!

2008-07-27T09:46:00.000-07:00

Last week was less successful than the first week, but I was busier too so I did the best that I could.

M: Run 22 min outdoors with S. Push-ups at night.

Tu: Biked 25 min on bike at gym. Foam-roller on IT bands for 10 min. 1 pull-up with a 10lb assist...I was afraid to try it with no assist since I've never been able to do a real pull-up before!

W: Push-ups.

Th: Off

F: Off

Sa: Attempted my first run longer than 3 miles on my favorite trail that I took Bubby up in March. This time I ran and dad walked with him in the Bob over to the farm to wait for me. I could have sworn that the forecast said high 70s. Due to our schedule, we didn't get out there until 1pm, and our car thermostat said 93 degrees! So it was a bit overambitious of me to try a longer trail run in the heat. Thank goodness I brought my fuel belt with one small bottle of water and one bottle of juice. But I made the mistake of running the loop clockwise, which means the first 75% of it is a slow climb up, then the last part is steep downhill. I ended up having to walk the last part of the hill since it was just TOO hot and I started to feel like my body was shutting down. Actually, I got confused on the way down and things started to not really look familiar, and I realized at the bottom that I had run a different trail down than the one I thought I was on!! That's pretty scary considering how often I used to run this trail. In total I was out for 45 min with a 10 min walk in the middle. The boys were enjoying looking at the farm animals, and I could barely keep up with them walking the last mile back to the car.

On the push-up front, we got lazy the last 3 days, so considering we didn't finish week 3, we're going to do it over.

Also, I've set up a weekly lunchtime run for our group at work starting next Thursday, and around 10 people have said they're interested, so that should be fun.

On another fun note, last night we went to my friend's house in Santa Cruz for dinner. She lives in a small suburb up in the hills, and they have a lovely Mediterranean style home with a great veggie garden growing out back! They sent us home with lots of arugula (wild, apparently, and very yummy), lettuce, escarole, and lemons. It was great food, great company... what more could you want on a warm summer evening?

Week 1 of triathlon training

2008-07-22T15:58:00.000-07:00

I'm about a week and a half into a semi-structured triathlon training plan. I'm planning to do my sprint on Aug 16, so that's less than 4 weeks away! What I did was just find a sprint training plan online, took the last 5 weeks of it and adapted it a bit.

Here's what I did during week 1, which went pretty well overall.

M: Swam 20 min easy in the endless lap pool
T: Biked in gym 30 min
W: Ran 30 min outdoors, with a few strides
Th: Swim 25 min easy in endless lap pool
F: Off - drove up to Sonoma!
Sa: Swam with Bubby and Cooper (see below - okay this wasn't a workout but it was funny)
Su: Biked 60 min with a stop for coffee and scones in between

Our intended bike ride didn't happen. Bubby didn't like his change of environment on Friday night, so we were all up quite a bit. So Saturday was a relaxing day where we jumped into the pool. On Sunday we just went for a leisurely ride to the store, but we ended up riding back from the store with some of the Vineman racers since our friend's house is right off of the bike course (on Chalk Hill Rd)! It was around 10am when the faster riders were out there. I tried to say something encouraging to almost every rider that went by, which was fun. I've never cheered on racers from my bike before! My hubby was ahead of me wearing a big sweatshirt since it was so cold in the morning. That was funny too.

I'm also in week 3 of the push-up challenge. It suddenly got REALLY hard. Last night our total count was 99 push-ups, which seems crazy! All I can say is that it wasn't pretty towards the end.

Bubby's first bike ride in the Burley

2008-07-13T21:36:00.000-07:00

We added the fourth stroller to our collection today, the Burley Solo. I guess it's technically a bike trailer but we got the stroller kit too. We picked this one since it's the smallest one. Of course we had to try it out tonight. K put it together and then off we went! I'm sure many moms can relate to my position of riding at all times either behind the trailer or directly to the left of it so that I could look in and see him. This is similar to the situation where new moms will ride in the backseat of the car with the baby the first dozen times out (I'm sure I wasn't the only one, right?) but I have a feeling I will always be riding near the Burley on most of our rides. Too many people that I know have been in bike accidents lately.

Anyway, Bubby seemed to enjoy looking around him so we kept going for about 45 minutes, just circling around the neighborhood. A few times he saw me and smiled...so cute! And other times he seemed to be checking out my bike. But mostly he looked to his right where there were lots of interesting people and dogs out on their evening strolls.

Next weekend we're going up to Sonoma for the weekend and will ride the Harvest Century ride. We had been planning to do the 37-miler while my friend J babysits, but now we're going to bring Bubby with us on the 23-miler and see how he does on his first bike tour!

Last Week's Action

2008-07-12T19:08:00.000-07:00

After my intense boot camp week, I had an okay workout week. Here's the brief summary:

Monday: Spin on bike in gym for 30 min

Tuesday: Pilates class at lunch. We used a big rubber ball the whole time. I was surprisingly quite sore the next two days!

Friday: Ran on treadmill 2 miles. I didn't have much time so I tried to run a bit faster, ending up under a 9 min/mile pace.

But the real action was had by Bubby when his pal S came to visit last weekend! Don't you love the expression on his face?

And today we got together with one of my college roommates. Since they don't live very close by, we had not met each other's kids before. It was a fun lunch, although things really got exciting when Bubby overturned my hubby's entire salad into his lap. Luckily we were eating outdoors and we weren't that hungry! But a few hours later we stopped by the gourmet hotdog stand, so maybe it was all a ploy. My boys have a lot of time at home together during the week to plan out these things. :)

Actually, they are doing great together, which I'll write more about in a later post.

I got the shirt...and Bubby got a shirt from a blogger friend

2008-07-04T21:43:00.001-07:00

Bubby and I are both showing off our t-shirts. I got mine for accomplishing my goal mentioned in the previous post. Bubby's adorable outfit including onesie and slippers are from blogger pal Lisa who was so thoughtful to send me a baby gift when he was born. We've been waiting until he could fit into this cute outfit!!

So after making it to all 5 days of boot camp this past week (hooray!) I'm sleeping in tomorrow morning! Here's a quick summary of what happened the rest of the week after Monday. You can skip ahead to Friday for the best part of the week.

Tuesday - Various weight-lifting (reps of 25), then walking squats or lunges, then sprints. Repeat 7x up to 7 sprints.

Wednesday - Had 2 groups where group A would run a lap while group B did an exercise of someone's choosing. Repeat 10x.

Thursday - Weight-lifting (4 exercises, 1 min each) x 2. Then wind sprints for 5 min. Repeat 3x.

Friday - This whole workout was described as "long cardio with a medicine ball." Various partner exercises with push-ups, sit-ups, etc. passing the ball back and forth. And then our whole week culminated in a 3-mile run with a partner where we had to carry the 8 lb medicine ball, passing it back and forth...yes, I'm serious! At one point it was my turn to carry it and we went up a hill (with a 12% grade) and I thought to myself - I'm laboring up this hill carrying a 8 lb ball - what does this remind me of??

Plus every day there was a lot of ab work and lots of push-ups. I guess this sets me up well for the push-up challenge. I sacrificed some sleep this week for sure, but every day I was happy to be exercising once I got up. My husband also lost some sleep since two of those mornings he had to do the 5 or 6am feeding in my absence. But I'm really thankful to have had this week since I feel like I mentally prepared myself to train again. Not at 5:30 every morning for 90 minutes but now I know I can do it. There should be no excuses!!

Will I wake up every day this week at 5am for the t-shirt??

2008-06-30T13:18:00.000-07:00

Okay, I'm officially back in my workout mode. After starting back at work 6 weeks ago I had decided to hold off on boot camp until my schedule stabilized. Last week I realized this might be as good as it gets for now. Also, with the sprint triathlon on Aug 16, I need to work out much more regularly this month so that I can do some actual swim/bike/run workouts next month with some regularity...that would be nice!

So this morning I got up at 5:15 and got to my boot camp class by 5:55, which I thought was even a bit early. But when I got there, I was greeted by a new teacher, and everyone else was already working out...and vigorously, not just warming up. Apparently it's EXTREME boot camp week, which goes from 5:30-7am each day! Honestly with the warm-up and everything I only missed 1 set of the main workout. It was a ladder type of thing that went like this -

Set 2
30 squat thrusts
50 heel taps on the curb
30 tricep dips off the bench
2 set of stairs
1 lap around the block (~quarter mile)

Set 3
50 heel taps
30 tricep dips
50 jumping jacks
3 sets of stairs
1 lap around the block

Set 4
30 tricep dips
50 jumping jacks
30 lunges
4 sets of stairs
1 lap around the block

Do you see the pattern here? I think a lot of boot camp planning is coming up with interesting patterns for the sets of exercises. We did this until we got up to 5 sets of stairs, then started descending again, and ran out of time after Set 7.

But the real question for me is whether I'll change my plans to try and make it every day this week, because then you get a t-shirt! My plan had been to just make it to boot camp twice this week, not every day, and not at 5:30 in the morning! And I don't even like t-shirts but I do like motivation, and this would be a great way to restart my month of more seriously workout out. I guess you'll have to tune in later in the week to see if I've made it...and if my hubby has survived the week of having to wake up sometimes if Bubby doesn't want to sleep until 7:15 when I return home.

Coeur d'Alene IM Spectating

2008-06-24T22:14:00.000-07:00

We had such a great weekend in Coeur d'Alene. It started off with a smooth travel day up there. Bubby did well on his first flight. He was very interested in looking at people. When we got to our hotel, we went out to dinner with J and his family and friends...a very nice group of people. After that we went back to our lovely hotel, and surprisingly Bubby slept really well. The next morning I got up at 5:30 while the boys were still sleeping to go down to the start of the race. It was such a convenient location for watching the race. The lobby was buzzing with athletes and spectators when I got down there.

When I got out to the race area, I realized my cell phone had died, but luckily I spotted J in the transition zone. He looked ready to go! He got his wetsuit on and then went off the the swim start. His entourage was parked at a nice spot for viewing the swim exit. Of course, anyone who's done a triathlon knows that you have to watch the swim start, so I started weaving my way through people. And then I happened to spot a blogger friend ironjenny right in front of me! I had been hoping I'd run into her. She introduced me to her friends and we waited for all the athletes to get to the swim start before moving in closer. I captured a cool video of the last few athletes walking in while the national anthem was playing. I love the various emotions you can see on their faces. Also, near the end there's a guy whose getting help with his chin strap adjustment...all the little details!

And then they were off! We saw one guy struggle for a bit, and then come back to shore. Then he fixed his goggles and jumped right back in to go out again! The mass start was really exciting to watch. After going back to the hotel and checking up on the boys, we all went out to meet J's group for lunch. Then we staked out our spot to watch him finish up the first loop of the bike ride. We got to see the first several pros go by, finishing their second bike loop. J looked like he was riding strong, and more importantly, he was still smiling!

Then it was time to take Bubby back for a nap. See why we had to stay right by the race?? After his afternoon nap, we decided to take him swimming. Not in the lake, of course, where it was 58 degrees or so! He seemed to like the swim, although it was really more lying back in the cool little boat thing I got him. Dad did most of the pushing around.

And then it was time to meet everyone for dinner. I had wanted to see J one more time during the run, but we had to get Bubby back for his bedtime of 7:30. Many thanks to my hubby for babysitting a lot of the weekend while I was watching the race. So I went back out and since J's estimated finishing time was still a little ways off, I joined ironjenny and other bloggers in the stands. We had a super fun time cheering people on. Then I went to find J's group a ways down the street, and eventually we made our way back to the stands. What I found really fun was that the excitement seemed to increase as the night went on. And of course, it was an amazing moment to witness J become an ironman!!!

And I realized that the trip we had already planned to Sonoma coincides with the Vineman 70.3 weekend, so it would be fun to see some of you who are going to that race. Since I've done the race and also been a spectator there before, I know some great spots for viewing it. :)

A nice big Father's Day present

2008-06-15T21:57:00.000-07:00

We had a very busy week, followed by a nice relaxing weekend. Last week was super busy with my parents' last week here and stepping up the house-hunting efforts. We spent a lot of evenings after I got home from work driving around different neighborhoods. They found two houses that they liked. One of them was spacious and well laid out but needed a lot of remodeling work. Also, we were suspicious at first that there was a parking lot behind the backyard fence. Then we realized it was a church. Then after using various Google mapping tools (btw, the Street View of Google Maps is very helpful for checking out neighborhoods you're not familiar with) we realized it was a church we had visited once many years ago. In fact, I had given a sermon there at an evening service for the elderly members of the congregation from a nearby intermediate care community! It's amazing how slow I am to catch onto some things these days! At first we thought, is that a divine appointment for my parents to live there?

In the end they decided they liked another, smaller house better. It has been beautifully remodeled, has enough bedrooms for them each to have their own office and for Bubby to sleep over, and has a lovely landscaped backyard with a citrus tree that my dad has always wanted. And it's on a very nice street, where one of my good friends actually lives! So they are in contract now, and if all goes well, it will be theirs in mid-August! So I guess my dad got a house for Father's Day this year.

So after all that activity we needed a relaxing weekend. Yesterday was actually my birthday, and what I most wanted to do was spend an afternoon out with my boys. So they took me shopping at Bloomingdales! I think Bubby was more entertained by the barbershop quartet that happened to be there than he was by the shopping. Then we got burgers and milkshakes...yum! Today we mostly stayed at home, and I made K. dinner. When I went out grocery shopping this morning, there had been some crying when we put Bubby down for his nap, and I came home to find all my boys in our bedroom. They were so cute having their Sunday morning snuggly nap together! Then later I got out and took Bubby for some much needed exercise (on my part). We did about 2 miles in the BOB. I got zero exercise all last week after the tour de cure ride. But I need to try a bit harder since my cousin really wants to do the sprint triathlon in August, so I need to put forth a respectable effort for that race since it was my debut triathlon 4 years ago.

Tour de Cure 2008

2008-06-08T21:51:00.001-07:00

If I don't blog about this now, it'll probably take me a few days to get to it. We had a really fun time doing the Tour de Cure ride for diabetes today, which was our 4th year. I got in a grand total of two rides prior to this. It was a route we've done many times before, so today was really about having a fun ride and hanging out with the other people we met on our team. Here were some of the highlights:

- Somewhere in the first few miles, I was drafting my hubby and thinking of reminding him to point out things on the road to me (sometimes he forgets). Just as I was thinking that, I involuntarily yelped since I went over a piece of roadkill...ugh. I didn't see closely what it was. At least it was completely flattened, so it wasn't too much of a bump, just disturbing. And it was all his fault!

- A few miles later, we stopped to help someone change their flat. Their spare tube didn't have a long enough valve, so we swapped one with him.

- Some of the rolling hills really tired me out, especially since it was in the 80s by mid-day. A lot of the people who aren't cyclists were saying it was a perfectly beautiful sunny day to ride, but I was dying of heat!

- There was a guy with a boombox on the back of his bike, playing some fun tunes. We called him the party bike, and at one point, rode behind him at a nice recovery pace for a few miles. Later we passed him, but when we stopped for the second time to help someone change a flat, I took a short video and caught some of my teammates (only from the shoulder down...I cut off their heads in the video..oops!) and the party bike going by.

- The second half of the loop was easier and faster, so we finished up in pretty good shape. My chain fell off at the last major intersection, and the technique of trying to shift back up to jam it back on didn't work, so it took me about 2 min to flip it over and pop the chain back on.

- All in all it was a very nice 50k ride and we had a fun time!

- I managed to raise >$2k this year with only one solicitation email to a few people, so I feel like I still helped out the cause even with much less availability on my part this year!

The conference bike ride

2008-06-03T18:14:00.001-07:00

I had a different kind of bike ride today. We've had these 7-person conference bikes at our work campus for a while. Today I thought it would be fun to try one out for our staff meeting since the idea is that you can have a work meeting while riding! And while getting fresh air! There were only five of us riding it, and the person steering and braking (the "bike captain") only had a VERY low gear so they essentially weren't contributing much to pedaling except up the hills. We went around our campus a few times, and there were some small hills that required some effort (yes, I even stood up once). So I don't know if I can count this as a bike workout, but it was better than sitting in a meeting room. And the next time I'll be on a bike will probably be for the Tour de Cure ride on Sunday!

Saturday mornings in bed or out riding?

2008-05-31T17:14:00.001-07:00

Last Saturday I had a flashback to my childhood. I used to go into my parents' room and watch cartoons every Saturday morning. And last Saturday morning we had one of those lazy mornings when we didn't feel like getting out of bed. Actually, the weather was bad so we bailed on a friend's kid's outdoor birthday party. So I caught up on episodes of Gray's Anatomy (on abc.com on my Mac) instead. And guess who joined me? We don't really let him watch tv since he seems so drawn to it, but I couldn't resist letting him snuggle in with me for a while. Doesn't he look like a big boy?

This morning, however, I got out for my second bike ride of the year. It was especially fun since friend K and I haven't ridden together for years...maybe the last time was when we did a training ride on the Wildflower long course and were so leisurely about it that people almost sent out a search party for us! She has had various knee problems since then which prevented her from riding, but she's now healthy and happy to be out there again. We did 18-19 miles or so (she doesn't have a bike computer and mine stopped recording distance...see what I mean about leisurely?) around the Los Altos foothill, stopping near the end to knock on a friend's door and say hi. There was one big hill that was SO HARD for me. And she kept asking me - don't you still wish you had a triple chain ring???

Baby's first Ironman - CDA

2008-05-22T09:41:00.000-07:00

Well, I booked our tickets this morning for Coeur d'Alene! We decided pretty last minute to go up for IM weekend to watch friend J race. It's going to be Bubby's first trip. I tried to keep things as simple as possible so we're going to stay at the Coeur d'Alene Resort on the lake, and of course, given my late booking, they only had REALLY nice rooms available. I hope he doesn't get too used to this! For those of you who will be out there, hopefully we'll have a chance to meet. We'll be the ones with the orange BOB jogger.

As far as my own workouts, I'm getting back into the routine of working out at lunch on weekdays with my work friends. I've given up on 6am boot camp while Bubby's still waking up at 3am every day (ugh). On Monday I did a short indoor bike ride, and two sets of ladders of sit-ups and push-ups. On Tuesday I did a 30 min treadmill workout with a bunch of hill intervals at 8-9% which was harder than I expected. Today the girls and I are doing cardio.

Speaking of workouts, I thought you would enjoy seeing Bubby doing what my friend calls "quite a workout for him!" in his exersaucer.

Back in the saddle again

2008-05-17T15:10:00.000-07:00

I was thinking of my bike ride today when I wrote the blog post title, but I guess it can relate to my week back at work too! I started back last Monday. It hasn't been as bad as I had thought it would be. I was telling a friend that the first day going back and seeing everyone was easy. It was the realization that I would have to work every day after that which was harder! I've been given some flexibility to figure out exactly which project(s) I want to work on now, which is a nice way to come back. Everyone has also been patient with me adjusting to working hours again. The morning routine takes a LOT longer. And I'm not even dropping the baby off anywhere. He's lucky to have his grandma B with him. They're having a great time together. Of course it's hard to have less time with Bubby on weekdays. He seemed to know I was on a work schedule since he woke up between 7-7:45 every day last week! So I usually have about an hour with him in the morning and then two hours or so before bedtime at night.

So we took advantage of her being here to take a bike ride together for the first time in a year. Last night I had to find all the gear and pump up the tires. I had never gone for more than a year without being on the bike (after I learned to ride at age 16, that is). I felt that my legs came back, but my riding position was a bit off, probably because I felt a little uncomfortable sitting in the saddle. Hopefully that will improve soon. We did an easy ride through some of the neighborhoods and out towards Stevens Canyon Rd. It was fairly leisurely although we did pick up speed for a few short stretches. My computer also seems to be dying, since it only recorded speed, not mileage. We went around 15 miles or so. The tour de cure ride is in two weeks, so even if I don't manage to ride again before then I think I should be able to do the 30 miles.

Week summary (including a runaway BOB) and summer event schedule

2008-05-09T18:27:00.000-07:00

It's been a great week, although very busy since I packed in a lot of things. Here's what we did:

Monday - Boot camp was really tough. I realized afterwards we did 300 squats!! Not in a row of course, we did laps around the blocks and stopped on each corner to do jumping jacks and squats. I was sore for several days. Then we had our weekly visit by friend K who's going to be our summer nanny...luckily she has had lots of practice with the little guy already!

Tuesday - I went for a nice walk with C. We decided to do a walking tour of a few parks that are within a few miles from our house. Her son and beagle also came along. Bubby of course decided he wanted to be carried home by her, which has become a routine for them. I'll really miss walking with her when I go back to work. Then in the afternoon we had a nice visit with A and the boys.

Wednesday - Boot camp was REALLY tough. We had a substitute teacher who is a former track star (and is going to be on a reality show about former track stars) and we had to run a lot of hill repeats. Then after we stopped running we had to go up the hill several more times, lunging, squatting, and skipping. In the afternoon we visited my friend who has a new baby....he is soooo cute! Then we had dinner at Coop's grandparents' house. It was delicious and the company was great, as always.

Thursday - K took the day off and we took the boys to the creek trail. It was a perfect day for a walk (in the shade at least) and Coop loved taking dips into the creek. It's best that I took this video accidentally sideways since it would probably give some people (like my mom) great anxiety to view it clearly. I can already tell that this is what my life living with a bunch of guys is going to be like! Lots of goofing off. Then we went to our favorite Japanese place for dinner. Bubby has been there at least three times already in his short life. He was totally flirting with the waitresses!

Friday - I've been organizing around the home since it's my last day before returning to work next week! I wanted to take a walk to a friend's house but the kiddo's napping schedule didn't allow us any long outings. So instead I cleared out some space in the garage to make room for our bike trainers. We're starting to at least think about cycling again.

I've actually been thinking about what events to do the rest of the year, and here's the plan so far:

* June 8 - Tour de Cure, 50k ride. I hope to ride at least once before that day. This is the team I've led the last 3 years. Luckily two other people from last year's team took over so that I wouldn't have to worry about it during my leave.

* June 21 or August 16 - Tri for fun - a local sprint triathlon that I did several years ago

* July 19 - Healdsburg bike tour (in Sonoma county) - K. wants to ride the 60 miler, but we'll see about my level of cycling at that time

Two dump workouts

2008-05-04T18:58:00.000-07:00

First of all, here's my first attempt at posting a video of you-know-who having the giggles:

I'm now in the countdown to returning to work - one more week to go! I feel extraordinarily thankful to have had this long of a (paid!) leave. My husband says that I get the end-of-vacation blues all the time, which is true. So I don't know what this would be called...there is probably no comparison. I also feel very fortunate that I won't have to adjust to dropping him off at daycare at the same time I adjust to going back to work. We have grandma B coming out for the first two weeks and then grandma and grandpa J for the next three weeks. And it looks like it'll work out for my good friend K to be his summer part-time nanny, so we may not have to find any other childcare until September!

So what does all this have to do with dump workouts? Well, I've mentioned before that one of our favorite places to walk the dogs is the dump/recycling center down the street since they have a nice hilly trail that dogs are allowed on. So on Saturday we all went, and Bubby and I jogged two laps, which I'm guessing is about 1.5 miles total. I felt great, considering all the time I took off from being sick. And then today, we went back to the dump, which I had always envisioned we would do if we have boys, because you actually can watch a lot of the recycling process and there are tons of different big trucks driving around. We went to get compost. It was Bubby's first ride in the pick-up truck and he slept through the entire thing. But we had a nice 20-minute workout shoveling compost into the truck bed. And on Friday night I did a little ladder workout - 9 push-ups and 1 sit-up, then 8 push-ups and 2 sit-ups, etc. etc. So it was a fairly active weekend overall.

Mommy's sorry

2008-04-29T17:53:00.001-07:00

One thing I was telling a new mother friend of mine who was feeling bad about picking her baby up without supporting his head is that I do many things each day that I find myself telling Bubby "Mommy's sorry!" about. This included the time I bonked his head on the side of the swing trying to put him in, or when he cries because the bath temperature is a little too cold or too hot.

But yesterday mommy was REALLY sorry. We had planned to go on a longer walk with friend C. I had fed Bubby right before and in the past he's done pretty well on the 2 hour walks we've taken. But today he started fussing about half an hour into it. I thought it was because he was tired and just couldn't fall asleep so I reclined his seat back. His crying only increased in volume, so then I stopped to give him a bottle. About once a week I'll give him a bottle of formula out of convenience, usually on the long walk. But this time I only had my water bottle with me to mix the formula with, and I had slightly sweetened it with a sugar free drink mix I like. So Bubby had to drink strawberry/banana flavored milk today!

But even after the feeding he wasn't happy, so we turned about and went back. C carried him the last half hour and he fell asleep in her arms. Then someone walked by us and commented "your baby should have a hat!" which was probably true but he hadn't been out of the stroller that long. He was still sleeping when we arrived home, and after he woke up and I fed him and then went to change him, I realized he had a poopy diaper. The poor boy had probably been trying to tell me that two hours earlier but I didn't get the message, and I hadn't brought extra supplies with me in the BOB anyway.

We were a bit worse for the wear but still got out for a walk. And this morning I finally made it back to boot camp, my first day since last Monday. I took it really easy but it was nice to be outside exercising. Another guy with a cough that has lasted 3 weeks was commiserating with me.

Great books from great friends

2008-04-28T22:30:00.000-07:00

We're trying to give our love of reading to our son early. There were two incidents last week that both brought back memories of my own childhood. The first was that my friend GS that I've known since elementary school who has her own 8-week newborn sent us this favorite book as a 4 month birthday gift. I actually had a lot of nostalgia looking through the poems since it reminded me of seeing it in GS's room when we were growing up. I never had my own copy (for whatever reason) but I remembered a lot of poems from it. And it was nice that my memory of it was associated with a friend too. She was always the more literary one between us and a true writer at heart, whereas I think of myself as someone that just likes to write from time to time. Then reading that made me pick up the other classic book by the same author that I had sitting on Bubby's shelf already. I had remembered a friend had given it to me years ago, but I didn't remember when. When I re-read the note inside the first page, I was reminded that J had given it to me when we were in college for my 18th birthday! So maybe that wasn't exactly back in my childhood but it was a while ago and I loved reading one of my books to Bubby for the first time. It's such a sweet story too that it's hard to read without tearing up a little bit.

Another fun thing that happened last weekend is that my cousin's daughter M came up to Stanford for the weekend that new admits get to experience the campus. Since there are some large generational gaps in my family, my cousin is a bit older than me. He was in college when I was born, and then later he went to Stanford med school. Then when I was a freshman at Stanford, his daughter was 2 years old and I met her for the first time. So it seemed like quite the life cycle that his daughter would be starting Stanford when I have a new baby. She stayed in the dorm that I had lived in when I was a freshman 16 years ago so it was fun picking her up there at the end of the weekend.

And I STILL have this terrible flu/cold thing that turned into a cough and losing my voice for several days. So I'm on the rebound now but still have a tiny cough that has been keeping me from going to boot camp (so no exercise at all for a whole week) and putting a damper on my social schedule too.

The BOB and other month 4 updates

2008-04-23T15:23:00.000-07:00

A friend mentioned that my blog has been quiet. I can't believe it's been so long since I last posted! We've been doing more of the same...taking walks together, going to boot camp, and trying to stay healthy. I was sick two weeks ago, then K, and now I seem to have caught it again. Bubby seems to just be congested at times. My favorite aunt has been visiting, and she and Bubby love each other. I've never seen him smile so much at anyone. He definitely seems to smile more at people who smile a lot at him.

One highlight was getting out in the BOB for a jog. We've been using it a lot just for walking, especially on some of the trails that Coop likes to go on. But last Sunday I finally took Bubby out for a 2 mile jog around the neighborhood. We had to get bundled up since I picked a really windy day to go. He seemed to do fine and probably didn't notice much difference between that and our walks.

I'm still enjoying boot camp. Last week I made it 3 days. My favorite day was running over to the parking garage of the local college and running around it 3 times - up the ramps and down the stairs. I also like that we do plank poses several days a week since otherwise I wouldn't be doing them much on my own! This week I've only made it once since the baby has been waking up around 3:30 am, which means that by the time I go back to bed at 4 something, I only get a short little nap before waking up at 5:15. So if I can't fall asleep, my day is basically starting at 3:30 am, which is completely crazy!

Bubby just turned 4 months yesterday. Since this blog is basically my baby journal as well, here are other things he's been up to:

Sleeping well through the night at 3.5 months (8-12 hours a night) but now he's gone back to waking up once in the middle. We don't know if this is just a growth spurt.
Sitting in his Bumbo chair. Yes, we know it's been recalled but we always watch him in it.
Chatting a lot, but usually more when he's starting to complain a bit. Dad calls it his jibber jabber.
Grabbing things. On his playmat, he used to just bat at the toys above him. But now he's discovered the ring behind his head and he'll grab it and hold on for dear life for about 10 minutes. 2 days ago he pulled my glasses off while nursing!
Laughing when shirts get pulled over his head.
Doing mini-pushups during tummy time.
Falling asleep on his own usually after just a few minutes of complaining.
He seems a bit more aware of Coop...the big furry thing that lives in our house for some reason.
First time jogging with mom!
More awareness of who I am. One time when nursing he turned his head to look at my face and then started laughing!

Boot camp, baby sickness, and books

2008-04-11T12:59:00.000-07:00

I survived my first week of boot camp! My goal had been to go to 3 or 4 workouts, and I made it to 4, so I was pretty happy with that. As my friend J says, sometimes it's nice to just show up for a workout and have someone tell you what to do. I already mentioned what we did on Monday. Here was the rest of the week:

Tuesday - Mostly weights with dumbbells. Curls, dips, flies, presses, lunges, etc. With jump-roping in between.

Wednesday - We did 5-6 laps around the building and on each of the 4 corners we'd stop and do something different each lap - 10 push-ups, 10 squats, mountain climbers, jumping jacks, etc.

Thursday - We were sent out on a little run, and since I don't know the area I just followed along. It wasn't very long (maybe 2 miles?) but there was a hill that we had to run up twice. It was soooo hard. I thought I was going to pass out near the top of the hill the first time, let alone the second time. My throat was hurting afterwards. Then we did some work with weights.

Friday - I decided to sleep in (until 8am!) and give myself the day off.

I'm really liking boot camp a lot. The variety is really fun and I've met some nice people. There's one guy W who is very friendly and has been going for 5 years. He saw one day that I was wearing my Nike marathon t-shirt (hidden under 2 other layers since it was so cold but he managed to still see it somehow) and he introduced me to another woman in the class who had run it the same year. He also introduced me to his daughter in the class who has 3 kids and was sympathizing with me about how tough it is to get back in shape. It's definitely hard work but I'm grateful that I enjoy exercising. So once I'm up then I really am having fun most of the time.

It has also been a tough week since Bubby had his first cold. He's been congested since Tuesday and it's just now starting to clear up. By Thursday morning I was really teary since I just felt so bad for the poor little guy. He would cry sometimes while nursing since he couldn't breathe very well and he also couldn't seem to take naps longer than half hour. The bulb syringe didn't seem to work very well so I had to resort to squirting the saline drops a few times, which were effective, but of course no one likes having things squirted up their nose! Other tips from friends were helpful - like the humidifier and putting a rolled up towel under his head for elevation.

I'm just glad that the weekend is here and that I survived the workouts and that the baby is getting better. Now I just need to find a dress somewhere in my wardrobe that I can fit into and wear to a wedding tomorrow!

Also, I finally have my attention span back for reading. I'm reading 3 books simultaneously - Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides (only 30 pages in and it seems really good), Nice Girls Don't Get the Corner Office (read maybe 30% selectively, and it definitely gave me things to think about), and When the Game is Over It All Goes Back in the Box by John Ortbert (almost done, and thought-provoking in terms of reminding me what's important in life and how easily we fall into the pattern of wanting to accumulate "stuff").

First day of (sunrise) boot camp

2008-04-07T18:14:00.000-07:00

Today was the first day of boot camp. It starts at 6 am, so I had to plan everything out last night for such an early start. I had to dig out all my cold weather layers (because when we have a high of mid 6os here, that's not until mid afternoon, and at 6 am it's still in the mid 40s). This morning I got up at 5 am when everyone else was sound asleep, pumped, ate a breakfast bar, and headed out. It was hard to find the place since it was still dark outside.

It was a really good workout. The instructor was laid back and encouraging everyone to go at their own pace. We did sets of different exercises like sit-ups/push-ups, squats/lunges, stairs, etc. with a lap around the block (probably 1/3 mile) in between each set. The group seemed friendly. It was hard to get my body moving at first, but after I warmed up I felt pretty good. And it's always nice to have the sun rise when you're exercising outside.

When I got home, I found a bottle at the kitchen sink and realized Bubby hadn't slept through my workout as I had hoped. All my boys were sleeping together in our bedroom...it was very cute. So I took a quick shower and hopped back in bed with them for a nice little nap. :)

Book Club: Little Heathens: Hard Times and High Spirits on an Iowa Farm During the Great Depression by Mildred Kalish

2008-04-07T10:50:00.000-07:00

Our book club met for what has now become our quarterly gathering. But seeing as how we had the holidays and two babies being born since December I didn't feel too bad about that. We discussed Mildred Kalish's memoir of growing up on a farm in Iowa during the Great Depression.

One of our members posted this blog entry on spontaneous wheat combustion which we enjoyed reading in her absence since she's home recovering from the birth of her new baby!

Some of the high points of the discussion were:

o While the family never really seemed to be lacking (or perhaps they were just content with what they had), she talked a lot about the concepts of thrift and conservation in a way that was eye-opening for us. For example, socks were passed down and got sewn onto the ends of sleeves and were eventually used on the ends of mops. S talked about her family always "using everything" in India when growing up. And I thought of my friend's family of 4 boys who are a great example of being unmaterialistic with their gift giving - they collect various little things into their "treasure boxes" and then pull out things to give as gifts.

o Her childhood was clearly different from all of ours. It seemed that most of their days involved chores related to food preparation or the farm animals. We enjoyed the stories involving the animals like the raccoons. G also shared a hilarious story about a raccoon getting into her house and finding it trapped between the window panes.

o Their diet was also hard for most of book club (who are vegetarians) to relate too. A lot of us skimmed quickly through those sections involving the animal preparation!

o I mentioned that I found the concept of forward versus hind teats on the farm animals very interesting and I felt sorry for the smaller ones in the litters who were always getting the worst place at the "table" with less nutrition.

o The book included a lot of recipes. It was more fun to just read through the recipes to see what they ate then and how it was prepared. I tried making Cotton Tops, which I realized were basically chocolate cupcakes. But they weren't as tasty as much cupcakes today...maybe I'll just blame that on our modern palates!

A perfectly relaxing day I would want to have over again

2008-04-05T01:02:00.000-07:00

Shortly after my childhood friend had her baby, she sent me a note saying she wished she could have every day back again when it had ended. I remember thinking that I honestly didn't feel that way in the first few months with the baby. I loved being able to stay home with him, but there were days when he was fussy and I was looking forward to getting to the end of the day, or more often the end of the work week when K would be home with us.

But now he is at a much more fun age, and I'm finally believing people when they say he's an easy baby. Today was a day that I would love to have over again. First of all, last night he slept 11 hours!! I got to sleep ~8 of those hours with one pumping break in between. Then after being awake 2 hours, he had a nice morning nap. Since K was working from home, we all went to visit people at my office for lunch. I had gone earlier in the week to see a few friends there, and everyone had looked around me like "where's the baby?" Obviously he's the one people want to see now. :) People paid so much attention to him that K said it was like they had never seen a baby, although lots of babies come to visit in our group. They are just very friendly people who like babies a lot!

Then we came home, and Bubby and I took a nap. I actually slept two more hours. We were supposed to meet with our biweekly church group but we canceled it since someone was sick. So instead we had a relaxing dinner at home. * A note to Lisa - thanks for your thoughts earlier on this topic of cooking. I think I've adjusted to making some quick easy meals most days of the week without stressing out about it. One thing that helps me is if I start making something that can become two different meals later. For example, my mother-in-law gave me a great recipe for a chili-type of thing where you can also take half and make it into a soup with veggies and tortellini. Also, a friend brought over a lunch of rotisserie chicken and salad that I later turned into pita sandwiches.

Tonight I also caught up with a few friends, by phone and chatting online. After Bubby went to bed, we finished a movie we had started last night, and then spent a few minutes reading through some resources on selecting childcare.

The only downside to this perfectly relaxing day is that I slept more than usual so now I'm supposed to be sleeping and can't fall asleep!

Visit from Grandma and Grandpa B

2008-04-03T07:56:00.000-07:00

I realize my blog postings have become quite infrequent, so I'm going to try and do better. Last week we had a great visit from the grandparents. Here's grandpa with Bubby, decked out in his first jersey. I also couldn't resist sharing the picture of him sitting in his chair where he looks like he's reading a newspaper on the toilet!

The week went by really quickly. We walked around downtown Los Gatos, visited the mom's group at my church, and had dinner with some friends one night. Bub seemed to be on his best behavior when they were here. He had his first two consecutive nights sleeping more than 9 hours straight. And he was a bit fussy the night they left, I think because he missed them!

And I finally did it and signed up for boot camp for a month starting next Monday at 6 am! We'll see how often the morning feeding schedule actually allows me to go, but I'm really excited to actually go do a hard workout.

A fun 5k run

2008-03-31T20:07:00.000-07:00

Yesterday I did my first post-baby race, a local 5k run, that my friends A and N joined me for. It was so nearby that we were able to arrive right before it started, which was very convenient. It was an all girls event and I was expecting to see some familiar faces there. We were planning to run together and see how it went. Here were some snippets of our conversation before the "race":

A (who just started running 2 months ago and had never done a race before, and was very tired since her young boys had kept her up half the night): Why am I doing this again? Remind me why I'm paying money to enter a race that is in a park that I could just come and run in by myself for free?

N (who ran her last 5k with me in <30 min): I'm really out of shape so I think I'm going to take 35-40 minutes

The 5k started a half hour after the 10k and half marathon, so it was fun to see the lead runners coming back on the out and back course. 9 am came and we were off! It was rather informal so there was no starting gun, just someone saying "3..2..1..go!" We started right around the middle of the pack. Since we were initially on a pretty narrow gravel path, it was a nice warm up pace. Within a few minutes I saw the lead runner (whom I took some swim lessons from a few years ago) and she was way ahead of the rest, as expected. Then I saw several other girls in the front of the pack that I knew from the triathlon club I used to be in.

The three of us stayed together the whole time and stayed at what was an enjoyable pace for me. We finished in around 30 minutes. N ended up being 4th place in her age group and A and I were in the top 20% (out of 100)...so much for all their negative comments in the morning!

Walking with the Js and the BOB

2008-03-22T21:42:00.000-07:00

This past week was a bummer since I had the cold and it took me several days to recover. So we didn't do as much as usual, and K came home early a few times to help us out. I didn't exercise at all after the run on Monday. By Friday I was feeling a lot better so Bubby and I went to visit my friend A and her two boys (J and J). Big J is my godson and he has become very attached to Bubby. He presented us with a handmade card upon arrival. Then when we went out to the park, he pushed the stroller all by himself to the park and back (about half a mile each way), steering carefully over the curbs. It was really sweet and he managed that stroller impressively for a 5-year old! Then when we approached the park, we had this funny conversation:

J: Is he (Bubby) going to be hungry?
Me: I might feed him at the park
J: I don't see your bag
Me: Well, he's going to take a drink from me
J: Where are you going to do that?
Me: On a nice park bench somewhere
J: I know a nice one in the shade where not too many people walk by

Who would have thought he would be so concerned for my privacy!!

Then today we made our family outing to my favorite park and to test drive the new BOB stroller! We really like it. It handles extremely well. The first part of the outing we walked with it in the mode where the front wheel pivots. It's pretty easy to manage it even one-handed, holding a cup of coffee, and going around people on a crowded path. On the way back I tried jogging a bit with it (with the front wheel fixed). I was surprised that it was so easy to maneuver, and at times I barely felt that I was even lifting the front wheel to get it to turn slightly.

When we got close to the park entrance, I ran into a couple that I knew a few years ago in my triathlon club. The wife and I were in the same pace group for track. We ended up talking about the time two years ago when we found each other at a half marathon and ran the last few miles together. That was the best paced race I ever had, with a 9:25 min/mile pace plus or minus a few seconds each mile. Probably thanks to the girl who was pacing me! It was funny to hear that they are both just running now, not doing triathlons. They said they were a bit burnt out on multisport.

And then when we were actually at the entrance, we bumped our other friends with two boys who were stopping to inspect a roly poly on the ground! We hadn't seen them in a long time and they are moving to the east coast soon. So it turned out to be quite a fun park adventure!

Bubby's big discovery

2008-03-18T14:23:00.000-07:00

The big news around here is that Bubby has discovered his hands. In this picture taken several weeks ago with his cousin J, he seems to be looking at his hand, but he wasn't doing it consciously. A few days ago, he started staring at his right hand with great interest. It's quite funny. He also likes sucking on his hand, so now he just has to connect the two things, that it's his own hand that he can suck on anytime. This morning I kept waiting for him to wake up since his last feeding had been around 2am and still doesn't go longer than 6 hours very often. Finally at 9:30am we peeked our heads in and he was actually wide awake and just looking at his hand!

The bad news is that I've come down with some sort of cold. I have a sore throat and could barely walk the 2+ miles around the neighborhood with my walking buddy C this morning. But at least we got some fresh air and her beagle also joined us for the first time which was fun. Prior to my cold my running/jogging had gotten slightly better. I'm usually going 3 miles now, which is the distance I'll have to run in 2 weeks for the 5k.

Was this stroller designed for off-roading?

2008-03-11T17:09:00.000-07:00

So today my friend C and I decided to take our weekly walk at my favorite park. This is where I used to run all the time especially when I was doing hill training. I didn't know how long we'd make it in the stroller, but the parts of the trail closer to the entrance are pretty flat and one small section is even paved. I definitely had a different perspective on the park being a mom with a stroller instead of one of the fast runners zipping by. We even stopped at the farm a mile in to look at the animals. Then we decided to try my usual trail and just see how far we got. Once I got used to some of the bumps, it was fine. Bubby had fallen asleep early on, so he didn't care where we went or how bumpy it was! He just kept sleeping, so we kept walking. I definitely did not see any other strollers out where we were. When we started getting near the top, I told my friend to head to the vista point by herself to take some pictures so that I could turn around and take my time heading back, since going downhill was even harder than going uphill. It would have been a shorter distance to complete the loop but the last part has steep, narrow switchbacks which would have been very hard in the stroller.

So in the end we walked much longer than I had expected - maybe 5-6 miles in 2+ hours including a short stop for Bubby's lunch. I decided there were 3 different zones where kids were walked in the park. The closest area up to the farm included all the regular strollers, kids on trikes, etc. Then the flatter dirt trails were for the baby joggers. The hillier trails didn't have any strollers or joggers except for us that I saw. Luckily my stroller is very durable and I'm planning to get the baby jogger soon anyway. It was really fun to take Bubby to one of my favorite places and even do the trail that I wasn't expecting to do again anytime soon!

Our hungry boy is back!

2008-03-05T08:32:00.000-08:00

And I don't mean Bubby. It has definitely been up and down with Copper. A few days ago it was looking really bad since he wasn't eating at all of his own will although he seemed hungry, so we were feeding him his dog food with a large syringe. But two nights ago, he decided he wanted to eat tuna. Then yesterday, his appetite finally returned! He ate just about everything we gave him, including dog food, and ate and drank out of his dog bowls without being fed by us. And he was acting more like himself (which basically means hungry a lot), like following us around to the kitchen, panting, and staring when we're eating. So we're happy that the old Copper seems to be back, although we know we have to keep a close eye and continue running tests for him since we haven't been able to rule out the possibility of a tumor.

Bubby has been doing well too. He's smiling and laughing more, which makes it fun to hang out with him. Yesterday we went on our longest walk together (with friend C) - about 4.25 miles in an hour and 20 min. Next week we're going to introduce him to my favorite park for running, although we'll still be walking until I get the jogger. I told my husband that Bubby will get to experience my favorite park before he does since he's not a runner! And I'm falling into somewhat of a weekly routine of doing my 2-mile run 3-4 times, a long walk, and weights 1-2 times. I think for now this is working for us.

Mid-week progress

2008-02-26T15:17:00.000-08:00

So far this week is off to a good start. After a rough few days, Copper is showing signs of recovery. He's able to get up by himself now and he's been eating again, although he now seems to be used to the nice meals K has been cooking him (like ground beef and rice) so he still doesn't want his dog food! We may still take him to the vet later this week but things are looking up.

My goal this week is to do something active most days. Monday I got out for my usual 2 mile run and today I went for an hour long walk with my neighbor C who's training for the breast cancer walk. I carried Bubby in the baby bjorn, and that was about as long as I could go since my back was starting to hurt. I think any walks longer than that will have to be in the stroller, at least until we switch to the jogger which I'm planning for next month. And I actually signed up for a 5k run at the end of March. I'll probably take it fairly easy since several of us girls are doing it together, but it's good motivation anyway.

Also, today we made it to the grocery store together. I had had visions of him melting down just as we entered the store, so I waited a while to do it. But he was awake and seemed interested in things. I was wondering if he noticed things like the temperature changing as we went down the cold aisles.

A friend from work sent me a photo of the day I took him to visit my office. He doesn't look too happy though! Do you think he's saying to me - mom, don't even think about going back to work yet?

Hoping for Coop's quick recovery

2008-02-24T09:05:00.000-08:00

The main thing going on the last few days is that our pooch Copper is sick. At first we just noticed a loss of appetite, which is extremely rare for him, but we thought was just due to a new medication that he's on. But then he really stopped eating and was having difficulty getting up, so we took him in for tests and found that he has pancreatitis. He is on antibiotics and got a few shots yesterday, which we are hoping will turn things around. The vet described him as having a stoic personality in that he doesn't show pain very much - he's pretty much smiling all the time. So we're trying to assess how bad he might be feeling. K has been trying everything to get him to eat a little. We have never given this dog table food but in the last day we've offered everything in our fridge - chicken soup, bread, bacon, pepperoni (which he did take a few bites of), and peanut butter. The picture here was taken by me and captures not only my poor photography skills but Copper's constant companionship. He loves hanging around Bubby and sees it as his job to alert us to the crying. We're trying to stay optimistic since we really can't imagine life without him.

I've been keeping up my 2-mile runs pretty much every other day. I'm forcing myself to build up slowly by doing the exact same route for a while. Today I was all ready to go out and then opened up the door to find that it was raining, so I switched to a weights workout.

Last week was a fun social week for us. We had the girls from work visit, one of whom has a baby born one week after Bubby. Then I spent a day shopping for wedding dresses with friend T. We're going to have fun planning her summer wedding in wine country!

2-mile "run" and other updates

2008-02-18T11:26:00.000-08:00

The workout highlight of the past week is that I got out for a short run the other day and made it 2 miles pain-free! It did take more than 20 minutes so I was going more of a jogging pace, but I was thrilled that my knees were not the limiting factor and I actually went long enough to feel my lungs getting some exercise. I've been using my foam roller pretty much every morning, and as I've always known, it makes a big difference. And then I need to ice my knees and take ibuprofen when I come back, which turns my quick little run into a much longer event which may span multiple feeding cycles, but it's still worth it.

Every blog entry for now will probably have a Bubby story, so here's the one from yesterday. We attempted to go out to eat brunch with him which we haven't done since K's mom left. By the time we got out the door, it was after 2pm. The first place we tried was too busy, the second one was already closed, and by the time we landed at IHOP I knew Bubby was going to wake up from his nice little nap soon. He woke up by the time we ordered and although K fed him a bottle, he was not a happy boy when our food arrived. I took a few bites and was planning to try and feed him and eat one-handed, but when K went to take him out of the carseat he noticed the biggest poopy blowout ever! I offered to take him to the bathroom for a change, but K said it was time to head home. So we took our to-go boxes and hurried out of there. Sure enough, it was a MAJOR blowout which involved hosing him down in the sink. Nice timing buddy!

Other reasons life is good:

- My orchids are starting to bloom! I love it when you forget what they look like when they're not blooming and then it's a nice surprise when they open.

- I'm so thankful to have neighbors that we're good friends with. I see C almost every day now that I'm walking around the block a lot and I sent hubby over to their house last night to borrow an egg. We ended up having C's hubby P over for dinner and games. It was a fun night.

- Bubby's starting to smile a lot more, although we haven't captured too many on film. We're better at capturing his funny stares.

- K wanted to go out for Valentine's day, even though I would have been fine with skipping it this year. So we're having a friend babysit tonight for our first night out in a while!

Out 3 times on a spring-like, napless day

2008-02-12T07:25:00.001-08:00

I ended up going out for a jog/walk 3 times yesterday. Since Bubby has been pretty good in the mornings, I decided to squeeze a quick 15-min jog into my morning routine when I put him down for his first nap. It was such a beautiful morning, and the day only got nicer.

In the afternoon I took him for a walk in the Baby Bjorn carrier, which he liked, as evidenced by him sleeping through the whole thing. Even at only 9.5 lbs, the 20-30 min walk made my back feel tired. We also saw my friend and neighbor C shooting some pictures of flowers in her front yard. She's getting really good at shooting with her macro lens..I think K is wishing he had one now!

Then he got one more walk when friend K visited us and as usual, Bubby was resisting napping ALL day long (except for the short one in the carrier). Which would have been okay except that he seemed tired and a bit cranky. So we tried walking him to sleep in the stroller. Instead of sleeping he seemed pretty content and smiled at her a lot the first half, but then became tired. Then S came by with delicious Indian food for dinner. It took several more feedings and my hubby coming home to put him down in his crib around 9pm before he finally fell asleep!! And he slept well last night, for 5 hours this last stretch, allowing me to write this blog entry.

What we did this week

2008-02-09T08:02:00.000-08:00

Bubby and I had a nice week together. Here's what we did:

Monday - Went for a walk and introduced him to our neighbors whose little boy loves Copper

Tuesday - Visited friend S and her 4 (!) boys. She made us a super yummy potpie to take home for dinner.

Wednesday - Went to the lactation center to try and check out how much he's actually eating...apparently quite a bit. We noticed that he's been gaining weight really quickly.

Thursday - Had a quick visit from N, then we went out to run errands at the phone store and the card store. Visited our other neighbor C. Then I actually cooked dinner.

Friday - Bubby hung out with dad who works from home on Fridays, so I got to take Copper to the vet. Then we met with a lactation consultant to discuss the eating and fussiness issues. He had put on almost 4 oz since 2 days prior. She thought that he did go through a growth spurt but now things have hopefully normalized so we shouldn't let him con us into always thinking he's starving and needing more food!

The above pictures are very common expressions for him. We call them "whistle mouth" and "touchdown"!!

Boot camp deferred, an attempt at routine, and the big wet spot

2008-02-03T06:41:00.000-08:00

I realized over the weekend that I won't be starting boot camp this week. Last week I only made it back to the gym once - for the same weightlifting class I did the week before, but I reduced my weights significantly so I wasn't sore afterwards - and I also took a few walks. And I got my new leg machine at home which also comes with a circuit workout. I had thought that I would gladly sacrifice an hour and half of my sleep for boot camp, but the morning sleep routine here is not close to being predictable yet.

K went back to work last Friday so we started working on getting into more of a routine two days before that. It probably would have been good if we had tried earlier, but we were enjoying our lazy days of waking up whenever we wanted. Now we're at least trying to get Bubby to nap after every feeding cycle (still 8 times a day) because he was just a tired, cranky boy too much of the day. He's sleeping a bit more now. This has also been helped by the experiment we're trying with feeding to see if he's getting enough during this growth spurt he seems to be going through. He's now 8.5 lbs. Once he consistently sleeps through the 5-8am hour then I can try for a consistent workout in the morning, hopefully by next month at the latest!

In the meantime I'll just look forward to getting in workouts at home during his naps or sneaking out to the gym when K gets home from work. I do miss working out...I had another dream about cycling last night! My cycling dreams always involve hills, both climbing and descending...hmm. My focus this week will also be going out several days to visit some of my mom friends and just getting out of the house more.

Also, a funny story from last night. We had just been saying during the day that it had seemed like a long time since we had to change his outfits due to "leaking." Then of course he had to prove us wrong by requiring several outfit changes last night. And to cap it all off, the big one came after the 2am feeding. This is usually when K brings him in to me and then takes him out to be changed so I don't have to get out of bed. K had just announced that there was going to be yet another change, and then I realized that there was a huge wet spot next to me in the bed! Bubby managed to wet not his own bed, but my bed! K tried to tell me to just "throw a towel over it" and go to sleep, but of course I had to get up and take off all the king-sized sheets including mattress pad. I'm sure there will be many more nights like that coming our way.

Bubby is lucky to have you

2008-01-25T13:50:00.000-08:00

This post is really a tribute to my husband although I've been thinking generally about how the last month has been relative to what I had expected.

What has gone well is:

- My hubby has been as good of a dad as I expected him to be. I always knew he would be great. He was the one who was more ready to have kids. All of our friends' kids flock to him and he never tires of being with them. This month he has been completely attentive to Bubby except for times he has worked, mostly from home. He has essentially been off work for 5 weeks now except for 3 days he's gone to the office and some other days he's worked from home a few hours. He will hold Bubby as long as necessary to get him to sleep, and some days the only 5-6 hours of sleep Bubby has gotten has been lying on top of K. He has not complained once or handed him to me just because he's tired (only when he needs a "drink"). He kisses Bubby all the time and tells him he's his "favorite baby." I however have been getting fewer kisses recently...but I know that more importantly God gave me the type of husband I need to adjust to parenthood.

- I'm really thankful that the nursing/feeding/pumping thing has gone pretty well. I never realized how much time and energy breastfeeding requires but it's well worth it. I enjoy the times I spend with Bubby during nursing and the time seems to go quickly, even though it's still 30-45 minutes per feeding. I feel like he chooses to be a dawdler even though he doesn't have to be. Lately he's also made funny grunting sounds while eating, which of course amuse us greatly.

- We had amazing help from our parents and a lot of support and love from our friends. We've had visitors most days this last month. But somehow when we need a quiet day just to ourselves, people seem to know and we won't get any calls that day.

- We've had some nice times to relax at home and just be together. We've actually watched a bunch of movies and probably 2-3 episodes of "Monk" each day...I don't know how I never discovered before that I liked this show. I do hope to cut back or stop watching tv (except maybe movies/netflix) when Bubby is more aware of it. K and I have also collaborated more on projects, like designing our holiday card and birth announcement after I learned how to use Photoshop.

What has been challenging is:

- I feel like my baby does not want to sleep much. I read that newborns are supposed to sleep 16-18 hours a day and he's only sleeping by my count maybe 6-8 hours a day. There are entire days when only K. can get him to sleep and I can't at all.

- The rainy weather has prevented us from going out and taking as many walks with Bubby as I would like. I still don't feel really comfortable taking him places, even though we've been out a few times. I would rather take him somewhere outdoors than with me on errands. If anyone from cold weather areas has suggestions on how to get outdoors more with the baby...let me know. Even if we bundle him up, his face seems cold unless he's completely underneath a blanket.

- I've discovered after having both grandmothers here with us that I truly have little interest in cooking as part of our daily life. I enjoy cooking sometimes, like ideally once or twice a week. And I like trying new recipes. It's especially all the cooking-related activities I don't like - the grocery shopping and cleaning up. So I'm trying to figure out if I can keep my family fed with nutritious meals without cooking regularly. The farm product shipments help with our intake of nutritious fruits and veggies (many of which don't need to be cooked), so maybe I need to start by changing these from biweekly to weekly.

1 month and workout updates

2008-01-23T12:20:00.000-08:00

It's hard to believe Bubby is 1 month already!

This has been a good getting-back-to-working-out week. On Monday I went to a weightlifting class at 24Hour Fitness. It was pretty good...kind of like a circuit workout with music. I've been sore afterwards, in a good way. I'm sure this is because I haven't lifted any kind of weights in a long time, plus I was not used to the format of the class so I wasn't sure which weights to use. A friend asked if I wasn't getting enough weightlifting from just carrying the baby around. Well, I did do a set of squats and lunges with him in the sling a few days ago. Unfortunately, he doesn't seem to like the sling very much. When he's uncomfortable, he extends his legs straight out, which doesn't work well in the sling. He seems to prefer being carried upright in a baby carrier.

Yesterday morning I got out for another short jog. I lasted about 10-15 minutes before my right knee started hurting. I had done some rolling right before going, but obviously I'm going to have to get serious about my old routine of rolling the IT band, then icing and taking ibuprofen. And of course ramping up slowly.

The first walk and first bath

2008-01-20T10:46:00.000-08:00

Here are some photos of Bubby from this week - prior to his first walk (you can't really tell he's in his stroller but he's strapped in and falling asleep) and his first bath. He didn't find the bath as relaxing as we had hoped he would. Also one of the rare times he has napped in his crib. He has definitely spent the most time sleeping 1) on top of K's chest - his favorite spot, 2) under my arm when he falls asleep after night nursing, 3) the bassinet, 4) the swing, and lastly 5) the crib.

Last night was the first time we took him out for dinner in a restaurant. We wanted to take Grandma J out on her last night. Bubby was pretty cooperative. He was mellow at first and then wanted his usual frequent feedings around dinnertime, which resulted in my first feeding in public. Hopefully it was pretty well hidden behind my Hooter Hider.

So my exercise goals for this week (which are highly subject to change given that it's our first week with grandparents here to help) are to make it to one lifting class at my gym, one jog of at least 15-20 min, and several walks.

Walking with the boys

2008-01-17T18:39:00.000-08:00

We've been doing more walking. Yesterday my friend K. (pictured here with Bubby) and I went for a nice 2 mile walk/jog with Cooper while Bubby and grandma napped. I felt a bit less creaky than the first time I tried to jog, but we only did maybe half mile. We went to the store to run an errand and then walked back. Actually, Cooper was the one dragging a bit on the way back, but it's been a while since he's had any long walks. He picked up a pinecone, which he was very proud of, and then dropped it after a few minutes when he realized no one was going to toss is for him.

So today we all went out on the same route - hubby, grandma, Bubby, Cooper and me. So far Bubby seems to really like riding in the stroller. He has fallen asleep both times. Hopefully this means he'll be a good running companion and also a good car sleeper like I am!

Tonight we went out for our first date night since we've had the baby since grandma babysat. Grandma J has been such a huge help with watching the baby and giving us some helpful tips on everything from diapering to trimming baby nails. She is a pro, having had 9 kids of her own and 22 grandkids prior to this one! Grandma M who had been here the 3 weeks prior did an amazing job of keeping us all well fed, and therefore Bubby was also well fed the first few weeks of his life. So we'll miss having them here starting this weekend when we'll be adjusting to life on our own.

Our first walk and trying to work off the belly

2008-01-15T22:57:00.000-08:00

Today my mother-in-law and I took Bubby on his first walk around the neighborhood. It was really nice. I needed to get out too, since I had planned for a run with the girls early yesterday morning which didn't happen (since it didn't fit well with the sleeping schedule Bubby had chosen for himself yesterday and I felt bad about waking up the other people in the house who had graciously offered to babysit to allow me to exercise). After a few days of fussiness, which both grandmothers concluded was likely due to allergies to my diet, he seemed a lot happier and more mellow today. He seemed to enjoy the half hour walk we took, sometimes dozing off and sometimes opening one or both eyes for a bit to check things out.

And if I needed more motivation for exercising, the weekly email I get from babycenter.com had this to say about my post-pregnancy belly: "there it is, right around the navel: a big, round, squishy puffball"!! I had just been describing my belly to friends as "squishy" the other day. So while it's not huge anymore, I can definitely say that a "small/medium, round, squishy puffball" is an accurate description of things right now!

2008 training, racing, and fitness goals

2008-01-11T08:24:00.000-08:00

Okay, I went for another walk with a few short stretches of running in the middle of writing this blog entry, so now I really feel that I need to think about my fitness goals. Running felt very strange. A lot of things felt a bit...creaky, I guess. It's going to be a lot of work to get back in shape.

Someone asked me recently if I still had the same name for my blog, which was a pretty good question considering that in the last 2 years I've only done 1 leg of 1 relay triathlon, although I have done a bunch of swimming, cycling, and running events. Maybe it is time to consider changing the name since I'm not sure how many triathlons I'll do this year.

I think my fitness goals are:
1) Stay healthy
2) Get stronger and more toned
3) Create balance in my life both the first half of the year while I'm on maternity leave and the second half when I'm going to be a working mom
4) Keep working out with my triathlon friends since that was always one of the funnest things about the sport
5) Find something that my husband and I can do together
6) Do 4-5 races since I always train better when I have a goal
7) Probably do at least 1 triathlon since I'm not ready to leave the sport completely

So my plan for now is to try a few different activities over the next few months and see what develops and what works best with my new schedule.

January - try running again (twice/week?) and weightlifting classes at 24Hour Fitness
February - go to boot camp, 5 days a week at 6am (ouch), do some indoor bike training with Spinervals
March - see how I feel about ramping up triathlon training or trying something new...like boxing??
April - at least do one 5k or 10k run

That's about as far ahead as I can think right now, and obviously it could all change.

Products I'm liking

2008-01-09T14:34:00.001-08:00

There are various products that I've been using much more of with our lifestyle change. The first one is the Slingbox. My hubby first convinced me to get this two years ago when he didn't want to miss his football games while traveling. It wasn't enough to record them and watch them when he got home, since once in a while he would overhear someone say the score, thus ruining his "media blackout" efforts. The Slingbox allows you to watch your recorded shows and live tv from any computer, with a high speed connection of course. I've been using it in the nursery when I'm nursing since I spend about 5 hours nursing every day and I need something to do! The Slingbox allows me to do everything from my new laptop - blog, watch tv, etc. It also means I'm watching much more tv than I'm used to, which only makes me want to get outside more.

There are many baby products I could comment on, but one of our favorites is the SleepSack Swaddle. Even with a lot of practice, we're not good at swaddling Bubby with a regular receiving blanket. The SleepSack is a nice wearable blanket that also has a swaddling blanket attached by velcro. We have several and we like the cotton ones better than the microfleece, which tend to ride up and make it seem like the baby might not be able to breathe as well when half their face is covered. Our favorite one has a dog and cat print on it!

On the getting out front, I've decided to at least leave the house at least once every day. The past few days I've gone to the bookstore with K. and out to run a few errands today. I've been starting to think about working out too. I think I'm going to sign up for a bootcamp starting early February and may do a few drop in sessions before then to check it out. I'd like to try a new routine while I'm on maternity leave. Sometime this week I might go for an easy jog and see how that feels. I'll blog more on my thoughts on working out and training soon.

The first two weeks

2008-01-06T15:03:00.001-08:00

It's been two weeks since we've been home with the baby. The time has definitely gone by in kind of a blur. Bubby is fortunately a really good feeder so that has been going well. He eats pretty consistently every 3 hours although sometimes will go for one 4-5 hour stretch during the night. He doesn't always want to sleep at night, and usually prefers sleeping with my hubby in bed to being in his bassinet. So this has resulted in us being awake in shifts, with hubby up the first half of the night except for waking me up to feed, and then I'm usually up starting early morning. I've adjusted pretty well to sleeping in small blocks of time.

My parents and especially my mom has been a huge help around the house, keeping us all well fed. We're also thankful for the many friends who have come by to visit. Usually we have visitors sometime around late afternoon, and then by the time we've had dinner it's time for bed again!

I realized yesterday that the only place I'd been out to in the last 2 weeks was to Target to buy diapers! And we've had some major rain storms here, so this morning I decided to take the opportunity of some clear skies to get out for a walk at my favorite park. I hadn't been there since early last spring, and it used to be where I'd go to do a lot of my hill training runs. Today my goal was just to get in a good walk, and I made it to the start of my favorite trailhead (which has 8 switchbacks going up for the first half mile) and then just walked back. I think I did about 3 miles in an hour, and it was the most exercise I've had in a while. I noticed a lot of subtle things that have changed at the park, like new signs. Also, I used to go earlier in the morning when it was mostly runners, and today it was around noon so there were a lot of families out.

Taking our first family picture was pretty funny. First it was just K. and the baby, and then when Copper noticed a picture was being taken, he jumped in front! I had to hurry to make it in, otherwise it would have been just the boys. :)

Reflections on the Event - Birth of Bubby

2007-12-30T23:30:00.000-08:00

Now that we've been home for about a week, we've settled into somewhat of a routine, although I'm sure that will change. But for now I have been able to find a few minutes here and there to read up on some blogs and my backlog of magazines.

So the much anticipated birth event was in many ways not what I expected. I had the early signs of labor almost two weeks ago, so I knew there was a 90% chance I'd deliver within the next 3 days. That gave me enough time to finish a few things, so going into labor wasn't a complete surprise. It was about 5 pm on Friday night when I first thought to start timing what I suspected were contractions, and they were about 7-10 minutes apart, more regular than I thought they'd be. By 6pm I had called K. to come home, and by 8pm they were 5 minutes apart and I had called my doctor to say we were coming in. My big blue exercise ball doubled fairly well as a seat during this process. We checked into the hospital around 9pm, and my friend J. joined us to help me though the labor and keep my hubby company.

The next two hours were the hardest part since I didn't have a sense for how quickly things were progressing and I also didn't do a good job of articulating to them how they could support me. I was 4 cm dilated when I made it to the hospital. The nurse thought I was doing a good job of pain management so she encouraged me to wait a while before deciding what I wanted to do. Within 2 hours though, I felt really exhausted and like I wasn't going to make it through 10 more hours if that's what it was going to be. So they put the epidural in, and after that they measured me at 7-8 cm. I don't regret getting it because the rest of the process was completely easy and pain-free after that, but if I had known how quickly it would go I might have chosen something else. The next hour or so was really relaxing and J. and I just chatted while hubby went to "refuel" (at In-N-Out). Then they suggested I take a nap, and within 2 hours of getting the epidural it was time to push. They had anticipated an hour of pushing, but after a few "practice pushes" they called my doctor back to come in, and let's just say she barely made it in time. She came in, took a look and said "Oh my goodness" and within 2 more pushes he was out. It did cross my mind at some point near the end that my labor had taken around the same time as my half ironman - 7 hours. Fortunately much shorter than expected.

Meeting him for the first time was definitely the best part of the whole process. I had also had a feeling he would come around Christmas. A few years ago we spent Easter at the same hospital when K. was getting his appendix out. I wasn't surprised that we were in the hospital right before Christmas this year and went home on Christmas Eve. It was very busy at the hospital since apparently a lot of people schedule inductions and c-sections to be done before the holiday. We got one of the last rooms available and I had a roommate the first night - until my friend C. who works as a nurse there came in the next night and suddenly moved me to a private room, and helped move all my belongings over too - thanks C.!

The fact that there almost no rooms free made me think of the other baby's birth we celebrate around this time of year and how there had been no room at the inn for him. The name we picked for Bubby means "little king" which will hopefully always be a reminder of what we celebrate at Christmas and how children are a gift from God.

And of course every day with Bubby has been an adventure so far. :)

Merry Christmas from Bubby

2007-12-25T11:54:00.000-08:00

Our Christmas did indeed come early. "Bubby" was born early Saturday morning around 3am. He came into the world 6 lb 10 oz, 20 inches long.

I'll share more about the whole birth experience later, but overall it went really smoothly with a fairly short (7 hour) labor.

Most importantly, here are a few pictures. It's already widely debated who he looks like. :)

An early arrival on the way?

2007-12-21T05:12:00.000-08:00

Someone gave me a "baby's first Christmas" toy at my shower, and I was thinking that even though he might show up few days early, it was unlikely that he'd be here by Christmas since my due date is Jan 4 and that would be a week and a half early.

Well, it's looking like it could happen. There have been signs that he could be on his way (my doctor predicted yesterday she'd see me at the hospital when she's on call this weekend), so we're just waiting and seeing. I thought yesterday might be the last day to finish things up, so I helped organize the garage, made a lasagne to put in the freezer, caught up with a few friends, finished nursery stuff, worked on our Christmas card layout, and a few other things. My husband had his last day in the office for a while, and he kept pinging me to ask "are you resting yet?" Well, not really....I'm very bad at sitting still and resting. I might still be able to squeeze in one more shopping errand tomorrow morning and that could help get things moving too. :)

Keeping busy...

2007-12-19T04:05:00.000-08:00

I've been keeping busy in my time off. Since the Rhoomba can't do everything by itself (only vacuum), I've been following this Real Simple cleaning guide. I like it because it recommends very basic cleaning processes without a lot of chemicals - only occasional use of an all-purpose cleaner (degreaser) and antibacterial wipes. You'd be amazed how much can get cleaned up with diluted dishwashing liquid! Granite counters, wooden cabinets, appliances, etc.

I've also been cooking large quantities of food to freeze (I make a really good spicy turkey chili), finishing up the Christmas shopping and card design for this year, and visiting with friends. Yesterday I taught a friend how to knit. A few nights ago she and her sister also semi-spontaneously stopped by with pizza for dinner, which was fun. We've pretty much finished up the nursery too, so a picture will be coming by this weekend.

An empty inbox, BOB stroller, and Aunt Julia

2007-12-15T07:07:00.001-08:00

Well, I made it to my last day of work yesterday! There were days over the last 3 months that I couldn't conceive of feeling "done" enough with things to walk out that door, but I did yesterday. Somehow, I also managed to empty out my work inbox to 0 messages! I found out there's a nice little note you get when it's empty that says "No new mail!"

Now I have 3 weeks left to go until the official due date, and while my doctor says she sees some signs of progress, I'm hoping to have at least a week to get some other things done.

Other random thoughts:

1) I really have nothing to report on the working out front any more, sadly enough. I've barely had time to even go walking the last week or so. I'm just planning ahead now for getting back into shape in the new year. I have my eye on this BOB stroller in orange. I think it may be more manageable for me than the Burley trailer, but I am taking ironmomjenny's recommendation on a stroller with a pivoting front wheel. And I love the orange!

2) I've also been slacking off on the book club updates. We did meet last week and discussed "Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter" by Mario Vargas Llosa. I didn't finish reading the book (which was very lame of me, since it was really good!) but we had a nice chat about it anyway. It was reviewed favorably overall by our group, and we found the main character to be likable.

3) The other books crowding my nightstand right now are Baby 411 and The Nursing Mother's Companion. :)

Baby showers, full-term, and someone called me a mom today

2007-12-08T00:55:00.000-08:00

Here's Bubby's first dog, that he received at the nice shower my friends from work had last week. It was fun for my hubby to meet the cool people I work with. Then a bunch of my girlfriends from my former company had a surprise shower last night when we went out to dinner, under the guise of someone else's 40th birthday...VERY sneaky!

I'm now full term, starting my 37th week. Sometimes I feel he might be a bit early, but I hope not too early since I'm working until next Friday and would love to get some things done during my days off.

And even though a lot of people have been starting to call me mom, today it came from a completely unexpected place. I was having lunch with friends at our company cafeteria, and when I got up someone I didn't know said to me "You're Copper's mom!" I was thinking maybe I had met her at some point (although Copper only came to work once, over a year ago, so I was feeling confused about the whole thing). And then she said she recognized me from pictures that his former owner had shown her (he works at the same company but at an international location now). I was touched that he would show people pictures of me and Copper and that she would recognize me from that on a campus of 5000+ people. Anyway, I love being Copper's mom, and it was a nice reminder that after the baby comes I'll still have my other 11-year old baby to take care of too.

And speaking of him, here's the latest in my dog-hypochondria-combined-with-nesting phase. I'm sure you all remember the Copper/worm suspicions I had. When we went down to my cousin's for Thanksgiving, he had warned us that they had had a bad bout with fleas the month before, although it seemed to be cleared up. A week after coming home from Thanksgiving, K mentioned he may have gotten a few flea bites, but we didn't see any on Copper. Than a few days ago, almost 2 weeks after returning, I thought I was getting bitten. Every morning I would find a few new itchy spots. K checked Copper and our bed and didn't see any fleas. I didn't believe him so I made him get out a flashlight, and we checked EVERYWHERE - in all the crevices of the mattress pillowtop, around the box springs, etc. Of course there were no fleas. And K seemed to be stifling his laughter at me as well. I still vacuumed everything in our bedroom using every single vacuum attachment I owned to get into the various crevices. I do have tiny little spots, which K says are not flea bites since he's apparently the expert in this matter!

My new routine and a new game addition

2007-12-02T22:37:00.000-08:00

When we came back up from LA after Thanksgiving I invited my favorite aunt to visit, which she used to do a few times a year when I could work from home more regularly. Now that I'm forcing myself to slow down at work, I thought it would be a good time to have her visit. She was great company last week during my hubby's last business trip for a long time. Our life has fallen into a nice routine, which has been healthy for me. When I'm working, she's been reading, walking, cooking, and playing with Copper. He will now bring the tennis ball in from the yard and walk right by me and drop it at her feet! During the evenings and weekends, this is what we've been doing:

Eating healthy food, including lots of vegetables
Various baby room projects, involving painting, sewing, knitting, decorating, and shopping (a picture will be coming at some point) - I guess the combination of the painting, sewing, and knitting can be considered nesting for me
Hanging out with my cousin and his dog - a cute Pomeranian (although she seems to confuse Copper...he's not sure she's really a dog and hasn't taken to her like he did with the King Charles Spaniel)
Last but not least, playing many rounds of Rummikub, our new game addition, which is a nice balance of a thinking game (involving pattern recognition, but it's not really strenous), and fun but not really competitive

Our Thanksgiving water buffalo

2007-11-24T04:54:00.002-08:00

We took a short Thanksgiving trip down to Orange County to see my cousin's family. Copper got to come along too since they have a yellow lab themselves and are very dog friendly. Our previous dog had always been a big fan of their pool. We've seen Copper swim before, but we had no idea how much Copper would LOVE this pool. It has a nice sloped entryway too. The first night there, he was in the pool within the first 15 minutes of our arrival (pretty late at night). This dog was clearly bred for retrieving things in the water.

The next morning, he was back in the pool at the first opportunity, and we probably stayed out and let him fetch things for about 2 hours...I'm not exaggerating. I mean, this is like an 80-year old doing the Ironman swim! I got in too and had a nice little swim. Actually, I swam 3 times within 2 days. I noticed from swimming behind him that his left hind leg often doesn't move, probably because his arthritis bothers him and he's giving it a little break. Poor thing. A few other observations from our swim together:

- We're around the same speed now
- My buoyancy is helping me rotate more fully but the overall form is still bad - notice how my fingertips are totally hitting the water sideways
- My hubby claims that sometimes Copper would get confused and think my swim-capped head was "the ball"

A few times we would be wondering where Copper was and then someone would spy him standing in the shallow end of the water, waiting for the fetching to begin. That's when someone described him as a water buffalo, which seemed very fitting.

Oh, and he also made a new girlfriend - a King Charles Spaniel. He did make her a little nervous so she would hide under tables where he couldn't get her, but she was also a big tease and didn't want him to ignore her either. She has a very cute, slightly off-center white patch on her nose.

And of course we ate a lot and had a nice time with family, and it went by really quickly.

Back from my last trip to a clean house...welcome Roomba!

2007-11-16T10:16:00.000-08:00

I decided to squeeze in one more short business trip this week before my leave. My dr also didn't want me to fly after this week. Typically I've done this in one day - taking the 6am flight out and getting back at 10pm. But I didn't think I'd be up for that long of a day, so we took the more sane approach and went up to Portland the night before. Somehow I got upgraded to the largest hotel suite I've ever stayed in, with hardware floors and a full 8-person dining table! My 2 coworkers and I actually sat down to have breakfast together, which was nice.

I feel like I've done a good job of not complaining during this pregnancy, but something about traveling is just not that comfortable when you're not yourself. We got what we needed to get done, and spent a good 3 hours or so in the car driving back and forth, but by the time I was flying home my back was killing me. There was no pain free position I could find...I tried them all.

But the nice thing about coming home at 10:30 last night was that the house was very clean, since my husband's new toy is the Roomba! We tested out an older version last week and liked the overall performance, and the fact that it vacuums by itself while you're out! It does a really good job with dog hair. The newer version in the link above does a better job with transitions between hardwood and carpet and handling obstacles like objects on the floor, tassles, etc. It has managed to drag things out from under my bed, like an index card and even a 1 ft wooden dowel. They have the newest Roomba at a great price from Costco, so that was the latest addition to our family that I met upon coming home last night. :)