November was busy too

In November, I won tickets for Kent and me to attend a gala for the Veterans Community Project. We bid on tickets for the Hip Hop Nutcracker and kept bidding long enough to get the tickets. We also bought a slew of raffle tickets for a quilt—there were several quilts, but I was only interested in the one you see here. Yes, we won the quilt too.

And we made our last trip to Yuma for Thanksgiving. We knew we were going to go for a hike so I (finally) replaced my hiking boots. Dad had bought me an amazing pair years ago, but they were destroyed when we flooded in Boston. These are the same brand, although not quite as nice.

Alison has taught herself acrobatics and flexibility moves. She is truly a pretzel (and didn’t get that from me, that’s for sure).

Kent, Ben and Jordan finally finished out their customized game of Risk Legacy. Jordan got that a couple of years ago and as you play, you settle the rules, and there are only so many games you can play until the board is full. This was the final year. Kent says it was a really great gift and I know he’s enjoyed playing it with Jordan and Ben.

We had our usual amazing food for Thanksgiving, made even more amazing by the fact that Ben and Jen and the family were moving to California the very next week. So we enjoyed the food, the fire pit, seeing all my family together again, and especially enjoying having Amanda as our daughter-in-law now. It was a great trip.

We got back late the Saturday after Thanksgiving, just in time for the blizzard the very next day. Yes, a real blizzard. But things cleared up enough for us to go to that Hip Hop Nutcracker I mentioned earlier—and it was amazing!

Wedding!

I have been a little preoccupied the last month what with my older son’s wedding, so I’ll be catching up with my posts. This time, though, I’m starting with the most recent and the most important.

First things first—the wedding was gorgeous and went off beautifully. My new daughter-in-law is highly organized and everything went off without a hitch. The ceremony was held outside in at Carnton. After the ceremony, we had a cocktail hour and could tour the mansion which was pretty cool.

Just married!

Carnton that night

I was able to participate in all the bridal party stuff that day, including getting my hair and makeup done professionally. As I watched the bridesmaids and the mother of the bride get their makeup done, I realized what a smart choice I made to have someone do mine. Some things are much better when outsourced!

Here’s the start of getting my hair done. I have a lot of hair, but it’s fine and very soft so the stylist used texturizing powder, then backcombed my hair like crazy and then used probably 10 bobby pins and half a can of hair spray. My hair wasn’t going to move at all, which was also good since it was incredibly windy outside.

Here's me with a french twist (no makeup yet).

I was trying to get a photo of the the lines of the dress.

I'm not very good at the selfies, but here's a closer look at my makeup.

As the makeup artist started on me, she asked what I normally wore. “What you see is what I do,” I replied. “Oh,” she said, “you go for the natural look.” Yup, that’s true but as I told her I didn’t want that for the wedding. I asked her to glam me up and that’s what she did. I’ve never in my life worn false eyelashes (I don’t have the skill to put them on, I have tried and failed), but I wore them on Saturday!

Interesting factoid: it was so windy out, that the ends of the false eyelashes fluttered in the wind.

This is Karen (my daughter-in-law's mother) and me. Yes, we both have on navy. My daughter-in-law helped us each pick out our dresses.

This is Karen and my daughter-in-law's sister who was the matron of honor. 

Full on Hollywood with my sunglasses and stole.



















Kent and me in front of the front door to the mansion. You can see how windy it is because my bangs actually blew around.

The ring-bearer (also the son of the matron of honor).



















KU was playing in the NCAA tournament that night. My younger son sat with Kent and me at the reception, and all three of us graduated from KU. So Ben whipped out his phone and we sort of kept an eye on the game while eating dinner (KU won).

And a photo of my corsage.

Thanksgiving 2017

November has been a packed month for me, professionally and personally. After my trip to Corpus Christi for work, I headed to Orlando (also for work). Alas, the view from my hotel room looked onto a boring roof, and we were nowhere near the ocean. It was so humid and foggy that I couldn’t see through my running glasses and every attempt to wipe off the lenses when I ran only resulted in more blurry smears.

I got back from Orlando on Thursday, and Kent and I headed to Nashville the next day. My older son is engaged to a wonderful woman, and her folks threw an engagement party that Saturday. If we’re friends on Facebook, then you’ve seen this photo already—I love it. I also realized that compared to everyone else, I’m kind of short!

This past Saturday, we flew to San Diego, picked up Jordan and Amanda and drove to Yuma to be with Ben, Jen and the kids for Thanksgiving. It’s definitely different running in the desert. I run before the dawn breaks, so I’ve enjoyed seeing the stars here in the desert and then watching the sun come up as I finish my runs.

Now I’m sitting here on Thanksgiving Day, so grateful to be with my husband, sons, daughter-in-law, future daughter-in-law and grandkids. It doesn’t get much better than this.

A new fitness device

About four years ago, I got a Jawbone Up (wrote about it here). Pretty quickly I realized that I didn’t like the interface or the looks so I returned it and got the Fitbit Flex I’d originally planned to buy. I wore my Fitbit faithfully, and manually entered my runs and workouts online. Last summer, it quit holding a charge so I got a new one. I (briefly) considered getting one with more bells and whistles but went with what I knew and was already comfortable using.

But over the last year or so, I’ve gotten frustrated with the Flex. It’s not designed to provide anything more than a relative scale of activity—you get your steps, you get some sense of whether the steps were light, moderate, or intense, and you get a very rough guide on the amount of time you spent doing your steps at that level of effort.

When I say rough guide, I do mean rough. For example, in Yuma I ran the same route twice; the first time Fitbit thought I ran 3 miles, and the second time, Fitbit thought I ran 2.65 miles. That’s a pretty big difference. It's the same with the amount of time; the Flex tracks in 15 second slices (I think?), so if you stop a run at the beginning of a slice, you'll look like you took more time. And you have to do the math to get your average pace per mile (assuming your mileage is tracked halfway accurately), and you still have to enter the info yourself.

So I’d been thinking about other fitness device options. While we were in Yuma, Jen showed me her Garmin Vivosmart HR+ device, and I was intrigued. Turns out Ben had done a lot of research to find a device that would do what Jen wanted it to do, and it turns out that what Jen wanted was pretty much what I was looking for. AND it turns out that I was able to buy a refurbished one for about $80 less than new. Although honestly, this device sure seems new to me—I’m pretty sure whoever bought it didn’t use it more than once and then returned it.

The verdict? I love it. I love that the device is fully synced to my phone, that my runs get uploaded automatically, and that I can enter something manually if I need to. I love that I know what kind of elevation gains I had on my runs in Provo (49 feet if you’re curious, there was an overpass I ran up and over every day), and what the starting elevation was too (4498 ft). I love that I can see my total average pace per mile, where I was slower and where I was faster. I love knowing my heart rate, resting and while working out, and I love that I can set the device to alert me if I'm not in my target heart rate zone, or I can set it up for running sprints.

All in all, I’m very happy I made the switch. Now I need to figure out what to do with my Flex.

Mother's Day

My sons gave me this blanket years decades ago for Mother’s Day. I call it the cat blanket because (duh) it's got cats on it, and also because these days, Wally has made it his own. If he’s not in a proper cat bed snoozing away, he’s curled up on this blanket.

And I thought perhaps this photo showed the cat blanket but alas it doesn’t. I’m pretty sure this was the same Mother’s Day I received the blanket; if so, it’s not in the picture. Sorry for the crummy quality—it’s a picture of a picture. Still, it's a fun picture with both kids in it.

Here’s another picture from the same day—again, not the best quality but you can see Tigger, who was a wonderful cat.

Another birthday

This time, it's my younger son. I don't have a lot of baby pictures of him, partly because he was the second and fell victim of the behavior of most parents with baby number two: far fewer pictures. But I will also say we had an entire roll of pictures from his first week that were completely lost by the photo developing place.

Here are two from the same day shortly before his first birthday.

32 years ago

Today is Ben’s birthday. Thirty-two years ago right this second (6:10 AM CDT), I was at the hospital and probably had already gotten an IV installed (ouch, hate those things) and was waiting for my scheduled c-section.

However, I knew that he wasn’t really ready to be born. You see, I knew the date I got pregnant (July 14), just as I’d known the date I got pregnant with Jordan (June 5). I went a full nine months to the day with Jordan so could reasonably expect to do much the same with Ben. That would put my due date around April 14. But I’d had an ultrasound to determine fetal age about halfway through my pregnancy with Ben, and based on fetal head size*, it indicated I was further along than that. So all the dates were shifted; my due date was moved to the end of March and the c-section was scheduled for March 14.

I briefly argued with the changed due date, telling anyone who would listen that I was due the middle of April, but remember I was young—just 23—and used to obeying orders from having been in the military. And the fetal head size indicated I was wrong. So Ben was born March 14 around 8:30 AM.

He was premature. He looked dreadful (my dad said he was an ugly little shit, and sadly that was pretty accurate), he didn’t really have much in the way of eye lashes yet and he was just super scrawny like a wizened old man (even though he weighed seven pounds, nine ounces). As my pediatrician said to me once I’d been moved back to my room, “He wasn’t quite done.” Well no, no he wasn’t.

Fortunately he experienced only minor breathing issues, some jaundice that took a couple of weeks to resolve and my goodness he slept. That baby was a sleeper. After Jordan, who never slept more than two hours straight the first six months of his life, Ben’s sleeping was a huge relief. By six months, you’d never have known he was that early—he had plump cheeks no one could resist, his eye lashes were as long as his brother’s (I’d irrationally worried about that) and he was such a snuggler. He’s that way with his own family today, and I love seeing how he is as a husband and father. It seems kind of silly to post on my blog that I’m proud of him, but it’s true and I’m glad I’m his mom.



*Turns out I have babies with big heads. 

Autumn leaves

This past Sunday, Kent and I made a start on raking the leaves. We have a lot of trees in our yard—the entire neighborhood is like a forest—so raking can be a year round process. We spent about two hours, filled 11 yard refuse bags and later that day, it was as though nothing had been done. Oh well.

I can never rake leaves without remembering one fall in particular when my boys flung themselves into giant piles of leaves, giggling and exploding out of the piles like little rockets. Of course their shenanigans always messed up the leaf piles, but their joy was infectious plus it wore their little bodies out. That was no mean feat!

L-Jordan, age 5, R-Ben, age 3

Setting the record straight

The scene: my kitchen in Columbus, OH
The players: me, Jordan (about 5) and Ben (about 3)

I opened the fridge to get some butter, and realized the butter wasn’t quite wrapped. When I unwrapped it all the way, I saw the very distinctive bite marks from my younger son. He had gotten into the fridge, unwrapped a fresh stick of butter and taken a big bite out of it. For years, I just figured he was a butter slicker like me. 

Flash forward nearly 30 years later.

I was at Ben's house this past weekend and somehow that story came up – I think because at least one of his children has his exact same overbite (which came directly from me, sometimes genetics stink eh?). I was teasing him a bit, as family often does, about his apparent love of butter when he said well no, he did it because his brother Jordan told him to.

Wait, what?

Since we live in the digital age, I texted Jordan and asked him, fully expecting him to say no, no, no, Ben did that on his own. Instead Jordan confirmed the story, that indeed he had told his little brother to go bite the butter.

All these years, I’ve thought that Ben just did it on his own and I’ve told others, more than a few others to be honest, about that story. It’s pretty funny to learn otherwise. Now I wonder what else Jordan told him to do . . .

American Gothic -- a family story

Years ago, we'd moved into a new house in a new neighborhood. It was so new that there were no trees to speak of because the area had been cow pastures previously. So we added probably six or seven trees. The one in this picture was a gift from my parents and we planted it at the back of the lot near a stream/storm drainage system.

I love this picture for a couple of reasons. First the boys are so young (five and seven). I don't have many pictures of their childhoods (their father kept the photos, although the ones I do have are thanks to my sons and their wives finding and scanning lots of my ex's pictures). I also like how it mimics the American Gothic picture by Grant Wood. Finally, I like it that you can see how tired they are. They were rarely tired, but in this picture they are. They'd wanted to help dig the hole for the weeping willow and that was hard work for an adult, let alone a child.

I went by that house years later and all the trees had grown well. Sadly, our old house was about the only one with trees. I guess no one else bothered to plant any.