Family Birthday Party for Trev

Saturday and my boy is 12! If I would have had him one year earlier all my kids would have had milestone birthdays in the same year. Melissa will be 16 and Jessica will be 21 in April. BUT he's only 12 ;)

Like usual we were having a party so it had rain in the forecast. We laugh now. What else are you going to do? It rains EVERY time we have a party the last few years. Actually maybe it didn't rain on Easter last year, I'll have to go back and look. Either it rains or it's super windy!

Anyhow, I had made the party for 4:00 which is a bit later than I usually do but I was glad I did that because it gave me more time to get things done. Plus my nephew's half brother was having a party the same day so lucky for me we had the times different so he was able to come to both parties. We were just missing my brother Joe who had to work. :(

For dinner we had hot dogs, sausage/brats and nachos (and salad). It turned out pretty good and everyone enjoyed the food.  Here's a bunch of pictures from the party.

SIL Maegen

Adrian loves to see Snookie when she comes over. She was her dog first. Trevor loves to tease her and say that she is his dog now.

I have a basket of toys for the older girls. Ava kept busy the whole time playing with them.

And playing on my rocking horse from when I was little.

The twins are crawling all over.

They took a turn on the horse too. Emma smiles so much, so dang cute!

Melissa & Vincent

Mom and the kids

Presents :)

Scott & Vincent

Selfies!

Tony & Melissa. He just got braces so everything hurts to eat.

Birthday cake!

More selfies

cutie pie

Yum carrots and dip!

Everyone was gone by 8:00. I cleaned all the dishes and cleaned up the living room, laid on the couch and passed out lol. Some day I will have a clean house all the time and not be a procrastinator to get things done. Yeah, who am I kidding ;)

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John's Incredible Birthday

Trevor's birthday was Saturday. I can't believe my baby is 12 already! Actually I can because he's already acting like a teenager. Except for sleeping all day, he doesn't do that yet like the girls did. 

I actually got caught up at work on Thursday so I took Friday off so I could get ready for his party on Saturday. I spent Friday morning cleaning and enjoying having the house all to myself. Trevor had early release day on Friday (I still think it's so dumb that they have early release days once a week) so I picked up him and his friend and took them to John's Incredible Pizza for dinner and some fun. Lucky for my bank account we got there before the "dinner time" price and it was a few bucks cheaper to get in! 

They have a big buffet area there and the boys loaded up on pizza. 

This kid ate 10 pieces of pizza.

I can't wait until he's over this not wanting to take a normal picture phase.

I ate WAY too much. 

Which was dumb because their pizza is kind of crappy.

After we ate the boys went off to play in the arcade area for a couple hours while I sat and played on my phone. When they were done this was the prizes Trevor ended up with.

At least they had fun lol. We were out of there by 6:00 and before the whole Friday night rush was there. Which, was pretty nice and I guess those early release days are good for something!

I'll post his family party on a separate post since I have a bunch of pictures.

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Romance

I’ve actually been back to working part time all week (getting off at 2:30) and ahhh it’s so nice! Wednesday I got home and then went out for my run, which turned out to be more of a run, walk, run, walk repeat 50 times to get 3 miles done. They can’t all be good runs I guess!

Anyhow, I had put a roast in the crock pot so dinner was done and my run was done. A few times I’ve toyed with the idea of riding my bike down to meet Scott at the club entrance. He’s been riding his bike to work more often than not lately. So today I actually had time and did it.

While I was sitting down there waiting for him I watched the sun set.

And then I noticed that the office was open and remembered that he had a package in there that I needed to pick up. The box was a bit too big to fit in the basket in the cruiser bike I rode down there so I just kind of balanced it on top while I sat there.

Eventually I saw him riding in. He’s got his bike lit up like a Christmas tree so I saw him right away. He rides in and stops and is like “hey I know you”.

I was like “oh, just thought I’d ride down here to meet you”.

Then he sees the box and gets excited that his new bike shoes are here. He’s like “oh I’ll carry that”. So he takes the box and we start off towards home. Well kind of.

He takes off riding and I’m trailing behind him.  He finally slows down when we’re almost home and talks to me a little bit, but by this time I’m like WTF did I waste my time riding down her to meet him for if he was just going to ride off in front of me.

Yeah, that’s how romance works at our house.

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Black Diamond Mines

Awhile back I had "liked" the page for the East Bay Regional Parks District. I'm not in the East Bay but I've started going over there every so often to meet up with people to run or hike or whatever. Anyhow, a post came up about an Early Spring Wildflowers Hike. I shared it and said I'd like to do it and would anyone like to go with me? To my surprise my Melissa said she'd like to go "just as long as there is no running" lol.

So Sunday morning we headed over to Antioch and out to Black Diamond Mines. I've never been there before but I've seen pictures of trails people have posted from there. I'm glad I noticed on the website that it was $5 to park and actually had $5 on me because they were most definitely making you pay to get in.

Everyone met at 10 and we all said our names and where we were from. There was a guy with a big fancy camera taking pictures for a newspaper and he went on the hike with us too.

Before we started we stopped to look at the Rose Hill Cemetery up on the hill. The ranger told us that there used to be a whole town in this area and then when they closed the mine they picked up the houses and took them to new locations.

and then he took us over to the poison oak bush to show us what it looked like so we wouldn't go play in it.

Then we were off! We just walked on the trails and then he'd stop and tell us what things were. If I wanted to remember I should have brought a note book but uh yeah, they were pretty ;)

We went up to the cemetery to check it out when we were done with the tour. It's sad walking around seeing all the young children that died. I think they must have had some kind of virus that went through and killed a bunch of kids or something since a lot of them had dates within a month of each other and multiple children in one family. Sad.

After we were done we had hiked over 2 1/2 miles. It was really pretty. Just a bit cold when we started out and windy but when we were up into the trails it wasn't too bad.  

I'll definitely be making plans to go back and do more trails soon!

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Almond Blossom Run

Last weekend I did the Almond Blossom Run. Ripon is a little town not too far from us and they have this whole big festival every year. Usually it's pouring rain so I've never been. Last year Scott and I both signed up for the 8k run. I was bad ass last year and ran the whole thing without walking and had a fantastic time.

This year I knew that that was pretty much not going to happen because I can't seem to run that far without walking and I'm definitely not as fast now.

Scott didn't sign up this year so I went by myself. Their race is a little different since it's an 8k and then they also have a 1 mile race that goes before the 8k. Since I've been running at least a mile every day for 180 days (that day) I was pretty excited to run the 1 mile race too. Although I thought for sure I wasn't going to be anywhere towards the top for my time since I know there are women that can run a pretty fast 1 mile!

I started off the race kind of towards the front but not right on the line. There were a lot of kids there and I knew that there was going to be some dodging around them. People took off like a shot when the race started but I tried to pace myself since I know 1 mile can seem REALLY long sometimes lol.

There was this guy that was running close to the same pace as me and at one point he turned to me and told me that I was "doing really well". I said thanks but I was thinking to myself, WTF I must look like a rookie ;)

The race is a small loop so you run the last part going out and going in and when I got kind of close I turned on the heat and just raced it in. I thought for sure that guy would speed up too but he didn't so I actually came in ahead of him.

I was pretty stoked to see I had come in under 9 minutes. I have only done that a few times, mostly last year when I was a lot faster and doing the run streak trying to beat my time all a lot.

I walked back to my car to change out my bib (they had separate ones for each race) and as I was walking back to line up that guy gave me a head nod like "eh, you aren't a rookie" haha. I should have told him thank you for making me faster!

We got lined up and I just made a plan to take it easy and to not walk until I got to the water stop. I remembered from the year before that it was about half way through the course. As I started running I noticed a guy in cut off jeans running and made another goal to not come in behind the cut off jeans guy.

It seemed like forever but I did run until I got to the water stop and then I did a lot of run/walk for the rest of the race. Towards the end I didn't feel like walking as much, probably because I knew I was almost done. I still got a pretty good time for the 8k with an under 11 minute average. Not bad for doing some walking. Usually when I run at home I tend to be around a 10:30 average so I wasn't too far off from that.

I got myself a little snack and then walked over to check the times. Imagine my surprise to see that I placed SECOND in my age group for the 1 mile run!  Talk about exciting!  I went and got my medal (they had someone at a table with them for that first race in case people didn't want to stick around for the 2nd race) and then sat away from everyone and did a little cry. Yes, I'm a dork. But it's pretty exciting to be able to place!

I thought my time was 8:37 but after I got the official results online it's actually 8:54. The way they have the results is confusing. No matter, I still got 2nd and got in under 9 minutes :)

For the 8k my time was 53:49

Now to find something to sign up for in March :)

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I'm tired

I've been pretty tired lately. I'm pretty sure it has something to do with all the exercise that we've been doing.

Along with running a mile every day I've started running a few more miles 3 days a week to prepare for the half marathon I'll be doing in May with my friend Sarah. We are going to be running the Tinkerbell Half in Disneyland. I was so never going to do one of these races but SOMEONE bullied me into it and so now I'm going. It's just going to be a girls weekend with limited "Disney Park" trips since that shit is expensive. I think we are only going in the park one day, maybe 2 at the most. Originally it was just going to be me and Sarah but now her friend Juli is going too and Juli has a friend that is also running the race. So I think they are coming up with some fancy outfits or something and I'm over here like yeahhh haven't watched a Disney movie in years. I'm sure it will be fun though.

But FIRST is the work. You can really mess yourself up by just going out and trying to run 13 miles. Although you can really mess yourself up if you over train while preparing to run 13 miles too. I'm just in the first couple weeks of training so it's not too many miles at this point. I'm still definitely working on my stamina and have been dong a bit of walking with all my longer runs (like 3 miles being long).

So running.

And we've been going to the gym two days a week most weeks, which isn't much but it makes me sore. We did leg day last Tuesday and I was still sore on Sunday. That's a long time to be sore. We've been doing the Jamie Eason Live Fit program again. This is Scott's first time doing it so sometimes we look like dorks watching a little video to make sure we are doing things right. But hey, who cares right? At least we are doing it.

So weight lifting.

Scott has been riding his bike to work quite a bit lately. Usually he lies and says it wasn't foggy when it was because he knows I don't like him riding in the fog. He has himself lit up like a Christmas tree though so at least that's good. It's 10 miles to his work from our house but he takes a round about way to get there because our main road to town has scary fast traffic and no shoulder to ride on. So short story made longer he's riding 20 plus miles on the days he rides his bike.

I on the other hand have not rode my road bike since September. But last weekend we took our bikes out and rode to Manteca, which is about 10 miles away. We rode to Starbucks and got a (light) frapp, sat there for a break and then rode back. I was pretty much exhausted and he was like "that was a good warm up!"

So all that on top of a lot of work has led to me wanting to nap a lot. I'm pretty sure that that's normal right?

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