Popsicles!

Popsicles are the best part of spring/summer by a huge margin. I plan to eat at least 47 million of them this season. I'm all about making worthy goals. The next best thing about summer is camping/hiking, followed closely by blossoms on trees and tennis. But since we have all of those things year-round in beautiful northern California, the popsicles are the novelty these days. Two common occurrences in our house as of late: me trying to steal Reece's popsicles, and lots of crazy baby-walking. Reece does the baby-walking, not me. He's just so much better at it than I am.

Count the steps in this next one. I counted 14. Yesterday at the park he pulled a 20-stepper, but this is a good example of his latest abilities.

He's a Big Boy and a Baby

My baby turned one. It's crazy! I am so happy to be his mama. He is so loving and fun and tender and such a jokester. John, Cory and their girls came up to spend a few days with us and celebrate the big guy's big day. Amy put it perfectly when she said, of Reece: "He's a big boy and a baby." Too true and a little sad for his mama to see him growing up so fast. Here's his birthday song video. Don't hate us for our perfectly in-tune, amazing vocals.



Let him eat more cake:

Some photos of the same event:


Natalie and Amy helped him clean off his face:

Happy birthday, baby Reece!

It's my birthday too, yeah!

Let's start this off right:

Okay, now the boring stuff. Happy birthday to me.

I'm happy to be 28. This last year has been amazing and I'm so grateful to have lived it. I am so blessed to have been Reece's mom almost the entire time I was 27. I would say this has been my best year yet. I can only hope that 28 is comparable. If so, I don't mind at all getting older. In fact, I can't wait to see what adventures lie ahead for us.

I started my 27-28 year 40 pounds heavier than I ended it. Thanks to having a baby 9 days later and then putting in some crazy hours these last two months, I am finally down to pre-pregnancy weight. That, for me, is a very happy birthday present to myself. Granted, I am not pre-pregnancy size, but you can't have everything.

I celebrated my birthday on Saturday with a great little hike in the morning with my boys (poor Reece was so sick):
This was followed immediately by a kickin' run (13.4 miles...take that, head cold!), then dinner with my amazing husband that night. We had friends over for games on Sunday and took naps to get over our various sicknesses.

Reece had a fever and so he got whatever he wanted. I ended the night with the traditional birthday dance...with myself. Pretty much just spinning in circles and flailing my arms wildly.

Yes, this qualifies as dancing. For me, anyway. Hope you all had a great my-birthday, too.

The Boy Who Could Fly

To clear this up right off the bat: Reece can't fly. But do you remember that movie? I don't. It came out in 1986 and I was four. But I will imagine what that movie would be like.

Reece can't fly, but he can almost walk. He's taken 5-6 consecutive steps in a row for the past several days, so we are increasingly worried. My attempts to capture it on film have been much harder than anticipated. Please enjoy our attempts:

At first I tried his favorite monkey as motivation. He proved too smart for me.

He's very goal-oriented.

But then he started to get frustrated.

And in the end all it took was the proper motivation.

General Cuteness (he's been promoted from Colonel)

I took these this last week. He just melts my heart.

Baby Stilts

Some general cuteness from the Reece-man. One from a couple of weeks ago, just because I can watch him play for hours and I think everyone else should too. Kinda long, so no pressure to watch it. The second one's plenty short and also just cute.






Kind of as a side note, when I listen to myself talk to Reece I remind myself of Stewie from Family Guy (especially the last minute of the clip).

My Own Brand of Half Marathon

Okay, so I didn't actually run a half marathon. But my pedometer said I did, so for now that's going to have to be good enough for me.

My plan for last Saturday's run was to do a little bit shorter distance than the previous week and substitute in some hills for cross-training.

The run started out very sluggish, despite my excitement. I was, honestly, excited to run. I try to pump myself up all week and continually visualize the run I'm going to do so by Saturday I can actually push myself out the door and do it. Well, I was excited to go, but as soon as I started running my feet felt like lead. That lasted for about two miles and then I finally started to get into my groove. And since I was feeling so very groovy, I missed my turn. And I continued to miss my turn for an entire mile. I didn't realize I had gone the wrong way until I got to the freeway. But I was still feeling pretty good, so after backtracking that entire mile I decided to continue on with my original plan.

I then got lost two more times. I eventually found my route and jogged up the Dish (pretty popular hiking spot on Stanford campus), which has an elevation gain of 500 feet. Not too bad, unless you condense that into a very short distance, and also have already been jogging for 6.5 miles. My original goals of jogging all the way up were not quite accomplished, but I got some good practice walking up steep hills. The most discouraging thing about this run was that my marathon includes an elevation gain of 2500 feet. All I could think was "There is no way I can do my marathon."

Once I got back onto Stanford campus my legs were screaming and my bladder was threatening to burst (gotta love the post-pregnancy perks) and I had to give up my pride and walk. It was actually pretty humbling because it seems such a simple thing to just keep jogging, and at that point I had only jogged probably 9 miles, but I couldn't jog any more. So I walked for about 1.5 miles, thinking to myself the whole time that this was the time to push myself because this was how I would get stronger. But my legs and my bladder were conspiring against me (too much information?).

I did manage to pull myself together and jog very slowly for the last mile (yay, little victory!), but all in all I felt pretty defeated. My pedometer gave me a nice little treat at the end, telling me I had gone 13.38 miles, but alas, it was incorrect. Due to steep hills and quite a bit of walking, the distance was off by almost two miles. That's kind of like running a half marathon, right? I think I might tinker with it a bit more and maybe next week I can do the full marathon in two hours and be done with all this training craziness.

This is how sick I look when I get home. Poor Paul.


And then, because there has to be something cute about this post: