December/Christmas 2010

I think I'm done apologizing about the lateness of my posts here. If anyone reads this I'm sure they know by now that I am a good month and a half behind on my posts. Meh.

So Christmas this year. As I usually do, I tell myself that I'm going to start Christmas shopping early so that I can be done and enjoy the holiday. Never happens. Although this year, I did buy a few things early online, and when they showed up at my house I put them in a closet (I have to hide them you see, since I have a child in my house who believes in Santa.) and promptly forgot about them until a few days before Christmas when I went to wrap everything. When I finished wrapping Isaac's presents and set them out on Christmas Eve, I realized that I had gone overboard.

Um, yeah. This is only the presents from Santa/Mom & Dad. This doesn't take into account the gifts he received from both sets of Grandparents, Great Grandparents, aunts and uncles. The kid is spoiled. But, he's an only child, so sue me.

Christmas and Christmas Eve were the usual. We went to Greg's Grandma's house for dinner and to act out the Nativity. Then off to my parents for the pinata. Christmas morning we were up at 6:00 am to see what Santa had brought. Then it's back to my parents, on to Greg's parents, and then we finished at my grandparents' house. Whew! Although it makes for a crazy and exhausting day, I don't think we'd change it for anything. Who else do you want to spend Christmas with than your family?

Picture time!

Here's Isaac and his loot from Santa. I will redeem myself a little by mentioning that a few days after Christmas I took about 4 gifts and put them back in the closet. I'll pull them out again when he gets bored. Just to spice things up.

Greg and Isaac working on breaking Spiderman the Pinata.

Prolly part of the reason I bought Isaac so many presents is this:


He is soooo fun to give a present to. He rips the wrapping off and then goes on and on about whatever was inside like it was the greatest thing he has ever received. He says stuff like "I've always wanted one of these!!!!" "This is the coolest ever!!!" I mean look at his face! He is THAT excited about the Matchbox car he's opening. It's so fun.

There were a few other things that we did in December, besides Christmas. Believe it or not. We made the trip to Temple Square with Greg's brother and his family.

Isaac took this picture. Not too bad, eh?

Maddie, Zach and Isaac.

One last thing worth blogging about. Greg and I went to see the Utes play against Boise State in the Las Vegas Bowl. It was a quick trip. We left on Wednesday, the day of the game, and came home Thursday. Utah lost, but we still had fun.

Photo Shoot

I had Isaac's 5 year old pictures done recently. Here are my favorites.

My mom went with us. The photographer asked if we wanted our picture taken with Isaac. Neither one of us was ready for that, but I think it still turned out cute.

Halloween

I realized that I hadn't made the mandatory blog post about Halloween. Since Greg and I are lame and don't dress up, this post is about Isaac. Imagine that.

He decided that he wanted to be an army soldier. We checked online for a good costume, and couldn't find any that we liked. So Greg had the brilliant idea of going to the Army Navy Store. Awesome!

He had a party at preschool where they had a parade for all the parents. Look how cute they all are!

These next couple of pictures are kind of tricky. Can you spot Isaac? He calls it "camouflauge-ing"

Isaac's 5th Birthday

Holy crap. I have a FIVE year old. Seriously. How did this happen?

For his birthday, Isaac wanted to got the Museum of Natural History. We have never been there before so we went to check it out.





The other thing he asked to do on this birthday? Go to Texas Roadhouse for dinner. What?? He's never been there, so I don't know where he got the idea. One of his favorite foods is steak, so he was in heaven. We told the waitress that it was his birthday so they had him sit on saddle and then sang to him. He wasn't too sure about it at first.

We also had a birthday party for him with his friends. Since he has an October birthday, we decided to have a Halloween theme. The kids all wore their Halloween costumes and we decorated pumpkins and played games. I also had this story I remembered from when I was a kid. It's a story about a guy that has died, and I have all his body parts. Not really obviously, but for his eyes I had peeled grapes, his intestines were cooked spaghetti, his ear was a dried apricot, etc. So as I told the story I would let them feel the "body parts" but not see what they really were until the end. Some of the kids were really into it and thought it was cool, others not so much.

Here's my big 5 year old in his new suit. (Something he asked for for his birthday.)

Summer Summary

Yeah, yeah. So I realize that we're well into autumn. But I hadn't posted much about what we did this last summer. I know I talked about my running, but that was just a part of what went on around here.


We went four-wheeling/dirt biking in the desert with my family. We somehow picked a day when the weather was perfect.






We also did a lot of biking. Since Isaac learned how to ride without training wheels, he rides his bike all the time.



Speaking of biking. Greg is officially the coolest dad ever. He built this ramp for Isaac. It's super cool. The second we pull this out of the garage, all the neighborhood kids come running over with their bikes, scooters, skateboards, and whatever else you can think of to ride on this thing. We have a really good time.

We hit Lagoon a couple of times. I haven't been in quite a while and we had a lot of fun. Isaac even went on some of the bigger rides like the white roller coaster and the Spider.

One of the highlights of our summer was this.

If you remember, Isaac is a big Jack Johnson fan. We were able to score some free tickets to his concert! So cool!

He doesn't look super excited here, but I promise he had a blast. He did end up falling asleep at the end though. It was kind of late though.

And of course we had to go boating. Isaac is getting more and more brave on his EZ ski. It still does make me a little nervous though.

Greg's birthday was in July. Want to know what he asked for? A lawn mower. I know, right? To be fair he asked for a push mower so he could make his putting green in the back yard. Apparently the regular mower doesn't cut the grass low enough.




And that's what we did with our summer vacation. Now it's back to (pre)school and cold weather. Yuck.

Here's Isaac all ready to go on his first day of school. Like I said in a previous post, because of his late birthday he gets to go to preschool one more year.

That's Dirty

So my friend Dawn calls me a few months back and leaves me a voice mail that went a little something like this: "Hi, Lisa. I signed you up for another race. Hope that's okay. Hope you're not going out of town or anything. Call me back. Bye!" WHAT?!?! So I call her back and she explains the race to me. The Dirty Dash. A 10k mud/obstacle course run in Midway, UT. It sounded like fun so I told her I'd do it. Sooooo glad I did. It was so much fun!

Our team name was The Piggytales. Cute, right? We were going to be a team of 5, but 2 of our team ended up dropping out last minute so there was just the three of us. We lined up at the start line, and waited for the countdown. How soon did my shoes get muddy? Almost instantly. There was a giant sprinkler spraying the first 100 yards of the course and it was shoe-sucking mud. The course followed one of the cross country trials at the Soldier Hollow resort. After running for a bit, the next thing they hit us with was this bad boy.
That's right. That's a snow machine. So. Cold. Like take your breath away cold. Then we finally got to run some downhills. On those hills were some hay bales to jump over.

That's me on the left in the red shirt and cowboy hat. Dawn's on the right in the blue. She's obviously much better at the hay bales than me.

Next up were the walls. This was my least favorite obstacle of the course. I am seriously lacking in upper body strength. AND they were surrounded by . . . more mud!

See, I probably look like I'm doing okay here, but what you can't see is that I talked some guy into letting me stand on his back so I could climb over. Yeah, I cheated a bit.

Next up was the smelly swamp.

It seriously smelled like something had died out there. A runner stuck in the mud maybe? I donno. But we got through it as fast as we could.

The slip and slide was next. My favorite. They sprayed this thing down with fire hoses so the water was nice and chilly.

Last, but definitely not least was the mud pit at the finish line. People were belly flopping and throwing mud all over the place. It was so crazy. The idea of this was that you were to crawl in the mud under the low hanging flags. Too fun.

We also ran through tires and tunnells but I don't have pictures of those. Good times.

Here's our team. Me, Dawn and Callie. The Piggytales. We were so muddy at the end that Isaac wouldn't even come near me. I'm signing up again next year for sure.

Red Rock Relay Report

I did it! I ran the Red Rock Relay in Southern Utah. It was a 186 mile relay race starting from Brian Head ski resort and ending in Zion National Park. It was so much fun. It was also one of the most challenging and exhausting things I have ever done.

We left Salt Lake Thursday afternoon to drive to Cedar City to check in for the race. After we left there, we headed to our hotel at Brian Head for the night. Umm . . . we got lost a couple of times and didn't get to the hotel until 12:30 that night. We were scheduled to be at the starting line at 6:00 a.m. Friday morning. So very little sleep for us. We got up early Friday morning, and headed for the starting line. It was VERY cold up there that early in the morning. I mean we're talking you could see your breath cold.

We sent our first runner off. If you don't know about relays, there are 12 runners on a team split into 2 vans. One van runs, while the other one rests. I was in the first van so we were up. Unfortunately, I was runner #6 in the van which meant I had to sit and watch everyone else run before it was my turn. I am a nervous runner. Before every race I have ever done, I get horrible butterflies in my stomach. So I had to sit for a long time before I finally got to go. My first leg was 5.8 miles long. It was also the one I was most concerned about. It had some pretty good hills in it. So add my anticipation nerves, my nervousness about the run, and then sitting and waiting for a few hours to do it. Not good. I got about halfway through it, and decided I needed to walk a few steps to catch my breath. The second I started walking, I felt like someone had punched me in the stomach. Ugh. I really had to push myself to finish. Even after getting sick, I still finished my first leg faster than I had anticipated. Woo hoo!

After my van was done with our first leg, it was time to rest. We went and got some food, (well, everyone but me, because my stomach was still churning) and get some rest before we had to run again. We tried sleeping on the grass at Southern Utah University, but it was so noisy that most of us never did fall asleep. We hung out there for a while until we got word from the other van that they were getting close. So we changed into our running gear and waited for our runner to come in. Then we were off again.

My second leg was 5.5 miles. Again, I was the last person in my van to run. This time I was okay with it though, because this was my night run and I was excited to run in the dark. Weird, I know. So, at about 10:30 pm I donned my reflective vest and my head lamp and ran. At night, the van was required to shadow the runner. That means that they would drive off in front of you so you were just barely in view, wait for you to run past, and wait until they could barely see you and then drive past you again. Kind of a leap frog thing. It. was. AWESOME. I loved running like that. We were on kind of a busier two lane highway, so every once in a while I got a little nervous when an oncoming car was headed at me and I got off the shoulder just in case. But other than that, it was a blast. I got to the exchange where I was supposed to hand off the wrist band to the first runner in the next van only to find that we had woken them up. They weren't quite ready. All of my van had ran our legs faster than we had thought we would and we had no way to warn the other van. The cell service there (in the middle of nowhere, really) was really spotty. So they weren't expecting us yet. I think the poor runner after me literally jumped out of her sleeping bag, put on her shoes and ran.

After we had finished our second leg, we went to find somewhere to rest. We decided we would just sprawl out in the 15 passenger van we were driving in. Between not ever getting very comfy and the snoring that was going on in the van, I think I got all of 45 minutes of sleep that night. At about 3:30 am we woke up to get ready for our next run.

My last leg was through Washington, UT. It was only 2.1 miles long. The whole time I was watching the other runners in my van go, I kept thinking, "This is going to be cake. I don't even remember the last time I ran only 2 miles." Well, I didn't count the exhaustion and sleep deprivation I had going on. It was hard! But I made it.

So I ran a total of 13.4 miles during the race. And I made some great friends. Caralee, a friend from high school, joined our team a week before the race because of a last minute cancellation. I'm so glad she did. It was so fun to get to know her again. She is an awesome runner too!

Here we are at the starting line all bundled up. Like I said, it was COLD.

My first exchange! Finally!

Here's our entire team after the race was finished. Don't we look tough!

Here's the girls from my van. We're pretty awesome.

I loved it and would do it again in a second. Although, a week later I still feel like I'm trying to catch up on sleep.