I Think We Have a Strange One

Granted, we’ve been out of the baby business for a long time, but Jeremy seems to me to be a very strange type of baby.  I don’t say this to denigrate him in any way because he’s a spectacular little guy.  (And I am a proud mom.)  But he surely is different than I remember the other two being.

First, let’s talk teething.  Jeremy now has six teeth fully in, four on the top and two on the bottom.  A couple days ago, we were holding him upside down, and he was laughing (which is the only way we can ever see his top teeth), and we discovered that he now has two MOLARS coming in!  I know that all kids teethe differently, but suddenly I’m envisioning Jeremy with a whole mouthful of top teeth.  That might make eating a bit difficult!

In addition, here is his new favorite thing to get a laugh.

I guess that little finger is just the right size.  My mistake was laughing at him.  He’ll do just about anything to get a laugh.

Jeremy has also learned to climb pretty efficiently, especially on the couch and on chairs.  I was making supper one evening and turned around to this.  (He’s only wearing a diaper because he’d been sprayed with a water gun by his older sister, and it wasn’t worth dirtying another set of clothes this close to bedtime.)

Charlotte, after seeing the picture, asked if I’d replaced the fork he’d been sticking in his mouth from her place at the table.  I told her no.

Jeremy also goes through stages where he wants to eat ALL THE TIME.  We are not big on giving our babies frequent snacks or juice, as we like to encourage eating at mealtime, but, last week, Jeremy would eat a big meal and, as soon as he was let down, he’d toddle over to where we keep the animal crackers, cheerios, and puffs, and sign “please.”  When his older sibling came up for breakfast, hed then stand at their sides and try to snag their food off the table.  If he couldn’t, he’d start begging from them.

I honestly don’t remember the other two eating like this.  I’m hoping that was just a combination of growth spurt and incoming molars!

Oh, well.  Every kid is different!

Steamboat Classic 2011

Let me just start off by saying that Charlotte rocked and rolled on the four-mile race.  As she was the youngest first female finisher, she even got her name and town announced as she sprinted to the finish line.  (We found a YouTube video of the four-mile race finish on the Steamboat website…very cool!)  Right now, her tally is five races entered, five awards won.  This does nothing to keep her humble about her running ability!

Nevertheless, she did place first in the female 10 and under division, and we were very proud of her.  I think that she dashed off and left Jeff at the starting line, and she must have passed me pretty early on, although I never saw her in the crowd.  She won this beautiful plaque, the biggest one yet in her collection.

Alas, on Monday, she will move up into the 11-14-year-old division in most 5K races, which means that she will now be competing with middle school cross country runners.  She would have cracked the top 20 in that age group with her time, but the winners were sub-25 minutes.  We’ll see if she likes running well enough to take her training to the next level!

In case you don’t know, the Steamboat has a four-mile race and a 15K race.  I decided to run the latter, and my race was, eh, OK.  I ran it at just over a 10-minute mile, which is my training pace, so I should be pleased.  However, I can usually knock it up a notch during a race, and there was none of that this time around.

The Steamboat 15K touts itself as the “toughest 15K in Illinois,” and, while I don’t have enough race experience to confirm that, it IS a challenging course.  It has one very evil hill and another pretty good-sized one…and you have to run each twice because the middle of the race is two, 2.65-mile loops.  Add to that pretty high humidity, and I was not in a place to set any personal bests!

After my first time up the evil hill, I was slow to recover and started dreading my second loop.  However, when I started getting lapped by the elite and eventually just the faster-than-I runners, I started to look forward to the hill.  At least, when I got there the second time, no one else would be lapping me!  (I find getting lapped to be a bit demoralizing, if you couldn’t tell!)

In any case, I ran the whole thing and finished strong.  This was helped by the fact that the last two miles are pretty much downhill.  My time was 1:33:43, which was decent, if not spectacular.  As Jeff and Charlotte were done running in under 40 minutes, they had plenty of time to wait at the finish line to take my picture!  (Poor Jeff is the only one who didn’t get his picture taken finishing, although you can see him on the YouTube video!)

After I finished the race, the rain moved in.  I heard someone comment that this was probably the first time the temperature was lower at the end of the race than at the beginning, so we were ready to leave.  However, we decided to check if Charlotte had placed before we took off and found a kind race official who looked her up in the computer.  Sure enough…first place.  So we hung around for a good 90 minutes after I finished so that Charlotte could collect her well-deserved award!

Each of the 15K finishers got a medal, and Jeremy thought mine was pretty cool.  He looked like a drowned rat by this time, but he didn’t seem to mind!

My dad came down for the weekend and hung out with my boys while Jeff, Charlotte, and I ran the race.  We celebrated at home by grilling steaks and drinking margaritas.  (Well, Jeff and I did anyway!)  It seemed a fitting end to a busy morning.  Poor Jeremy fell asleep on the way home, slept through lunch, and woke up nearly four hours later.  I guess he wasn’t thrilled about being woken up at 6:00 a.m. on a Saturday morning!

And that’s my race day story.  Talk to you soon!

Breathing Room

It’s been a roller-coaster couple of weeks.  As many of you know what has been going on, I’m not going to go into details on the blog, but what I will say is that I’m glad Jeff is back in town because summer activities have hit with a vengeance.

Elijah moved from baseball camp last week to soccer camp this week.  We had a fortunate break in the weather, which made for a better week all around for running, baseball, and other athletic endeavors.  However, the temperatures are creeping back up into the 80’s, so I think we’re at the end of our respite!

The Steamboat Classic, a venerable and popular running event in this area, is Saturday.  Jeff and Charlotte will be participating in the four-mile run, and I will be doing the 15K.  I’m crossing my fingers that the 7:00 a.m. start time will still find temperatures holding in the lower 70’s, which would be very atypical for this particular race.  But one can always hope!

My dad is planning to come down to watch Jeremy and Elijah, along with the race, which will be very nice.  I had a good five-mile run yesterday, my best outing in a couple of weeks, so I’m hoping that translates to a decent run on Saturday.  After that, I think that I am  going to jump into marathon training.  Woo-hoo!

The summer is certainly speeding by, which is pretty usual.  Athletic camps, work travel, vacation, the kids’ trip to Tennessee, church camp…sometimes I wonder when and why I relinquished control of our schedule!  My greatest blessing is that Jeremy is a pretty adaptable baby and doesn’t seem to suffer too much from our life on the go.  Today, he’s even managed two naps…in his crib!  Again, woo-hoo!

Speaking of Jeremy, he certainly does keep me hopping.  Just yesterday, he managed to pull a plastic mug of water off the dining room table, to pour it all over himself and the floor while attempting to drink it, and then to slip in the puddle he made and fall down!  Boy, was he howling by the time that little bit of slapstick got done.  And, then, while I was fixing supper last night, he pulled a measuring cup full of dry rice off the counter, waved it around, and then looked absolutely terrified of what he had managed to do.

I’m not sure when he got tall enough to pull things off the counter, but, man, I can’t turn my back on him!

Here are a few pictures of our little troublemaker.

And I’ll end with a few pictures of our baseball player.  This is Elijah’s very first season to play, and he’s really enjoying it.  He got to pitch in the last game, which he found a bit overwhelming, but he did pretty well.

I hope that things are well wherever you are.  Have a good one!

Flying Solo

So, to cheer myself up, I thought I’d make a list of the things that I enjoy about Jeff’s being gone.  After all, always look on the bright side of life and all that, right?

I was able to come up with one thing:  I can park the car in the middle of the garage instead of squeezing up to the edge so both cars will fit inside.

Huh.

I thought about listing that I can stay up late scrapbooking or reading, but, really, staying up late is something that I always regret, as I have a little one that doesn’t really like to sleep in.  So, I decided not to put that on the perk list.

So, I guess that I’m just kind of sad that he’s gone.

This week kicks off the summer activities, after two weeks of lovely, mostly restful down time.  Elijah has two baseball games this week, in addition to baseball camp.  Camp runs from 8:00 a.m. to 10:30 a.m., which is going to be a rather rude shock for my boy who now regularly sleeps until the camp end time!  I’m just glad that this will save me from feeling the need to get outside and toss a ball with him or take him to the park to practice batting, both of which are primarily Dad jobs.

Yesterday, Charlotte had her first summer activity, a day-long basketball camp at nearby Eureka College.  She really enjoyed it and even won the “Hot Shot” contest for her group of sixth graders.  She also came in second in the one-on-one competition.  We’re very proud of how she’s coming along in basketball!  As she will playing in a co-ed league come November, I’m glad that she is honing her skills and hopefully toughening up a little bit.

Charlotte has finally decided not to play soccer in the fall.  This spring, she discovered that she still has a lot of residual fear from breaking her leg last fall.  She used to be fast, aggressive, and an asset to her team.  This past season, by contrast, she was hesitant and would visibly back off if someone from the other team went after the ball as she did.  I believe that she tried her hardest, but we told her that she either needed to get over being scared or she needed to focus on another sport, as she wasn’t doing her team any good the way she was playing.  After arguing with us for a bit over fall soccer, we told her to think and pray about it and then tell us her decision.  She decided that she wouldn’t play soccer but would perhaps try softball next summer.

We think that’s probably a good call.  And, selfishly, it will be very nice to have to track two practices and two games this fall!

In other random news…as it has all over the country, it has turned hot here lately!  A friend and I met on Saturday morning at 6:30 to do a hill run, and we felt as if we were slugging through water with the high humidity.  I’m reading Facebook posts from my Mississippi running friends and feeling their pain, as I know the humidity is worse there than here!  Wow!  I’m planning to start training for a marathon in a few weeks, and I’m wondering what the reality of that will be.  Getting up before dawn to run?  Waiting until evening?  Holy smokes!

And, before I close, here’s one final story about our continuing food saga with Jeremy.  For the past week, he’s been on a vegetable strike.  Not that he likes a whole lot of vegetables to start, but he began refusing peas and carrots, squash, and sweet potatoes, which had been standards.  Then, today, we were at a restaurant lunch gathering of the small-group leadership at our church, and pizza was on the menu.  Well, I had already given Jeremy fruit and cereal and had gotten him his own cup of water that he could suck through a straw, but, as soon as I sat down with my pizza, he started pointing at it and signing “please.”

So, I gave him a bite of cheese pizza, which he immediately spat on the floor.  To show him that he really didn’t want my mushroom/pepperoni/sausage pizza, I gave him a bite of mushroom.  And wouldn’t you know…he gobbled it down and immediately asked for more!  Instead of animal crackers, he was signing “please” for mushrooms.

And tonight, he ate chicken tenders from the table.  I’m thinking that maybe I just ought to put him completely on table food.

Crazy baby!

Have a great week!

I Can Tell It’s Summer When…

1.  It’s 10:00, and my children are just now stumbling out of bed.  Elijah is averaging 12 hours a night!

2.  The baby sleeps until 8:00 because there’s no one knocking around in the kitchen to wake him up.  I guess that Jeff getting ready for work no longer registers!

3.  I actually have time to finish my Bible reading plus two other books…all in one day!  Granted, one was tween fiction, and I had to stay up until 11:00 p.m., but still!  This hasn’t happened since I can remember.

Of course, these past two weeks have been more a reprieve than a pattern.  Next week, sports camps start and continue through the end of the month.  Baseball for Elijah, soccer for Elijah, and then basketball for Charlotte will take us to July.  Then, we have family vacation and Tennessee week for Charlotte and Elijah.  Squeezed in there are several trips to Thailand for Jeff, church camp for both older kids, and a possible short trip to Michigan around my niece’s birthday.

We’ll see how that all goes.

As for our sickness update…Jeremy managed to pass on the virus to all of us except Jeff.  I ran a low-grade fever for six days before going to the doctor yesterday.  I was diagnosed with sinusitis and given antibiotics.  The older kids haven’t run fever since Tuesday and are feeling great today. 

This is good because we have a lake party today with our homeschool co-op to celebrate the end of the school year.  The kids would have been really bummed to miss this, especially as we have perfect weather for playing in ice-cold water:  92 degrees and humid.

However, this is not perfect running weather.  I’ve been running in the evenings here lately in an effort to stay on top of the heat and humidity.  Whew!

Ah, summer!  Hope that yours is going well!