Young Party of Four

Happy (almost) Valentine's Day! This year we decided to take a run before Valentine's Day. Honestly, Valentine's Day is a minimal holiday around here. Usually we get the kids a couple tiny things and we sometimes get each other something very small but we don't do dinner out or anything and we haven't had a true date night in about 2 years anyway so even if we were to do dinner... we would probably have the kids with us anyway. =) In lieu of all that though, we decided to take on the Run 4 Love 4 mile race in Winter Park the weekend before Valentine's Day. It nice because although we don't run together, we at least get some alone time in the car, before and after the race, and we often stop for breakfast after we run. Nothing major... but it's how we roll. Or run rather. This was our first race on a Saturday. Not sure why Sundays tend to be preferred for races... but they are. This one was Saturday though which ended up working out well because we w...

Tomorrow is my anniversary. Well, my runniversary. On February 9, 2016 I started this running journey. I can't believe it was one year ago that I opened up the C25K app (for the third time in my life), hit start workout and went for it. As usual, I had high hopes but I knew I had already started this journey twice and not followed through. I wanted to make a positive healthy change in my life though and running seemed to be a (fairly) inexpensive hobby that didn't require any special equipment (though I have spent money on shoes and few other items along the way that make running more enjoyable) and I could do it at any time of day on any day of the week. Sign me up! Those first few weeks were torture. I was tired. I was sore. I had shin splints like it was going out of style. My legs burned after a run and ached for a day or so after. I often felt like I wasn't doing enough because I couldn't always keep up with what was expected of me with that crazy app. But ...

So we are officially one month into the new year. We have been working hard on our Second A Day project. Initially Steven seemed to think it was a bit silly. That was before we set it to music and it was longer than 10 seconds. Now, every day we put it all together and watch it a few times and just smile. We are loving doing this project. Seeing a full month come together has been awesome. To see an entire year come together is going to be so cool. I think the hardest part of this challenge other than actually remembering to take a video every day, is thinking in a second at a time. I tend to take a lot of videos anyway but they are almost always of the kids. Our year long video is bound to be mostly kid related, but that doesn't mean it has to be everything. There are other things going on around here too that we might want to document. So, although I usually have at least one video a day that I could find a second worth of a clip to use for the video, sometimes we want somethin...

As of tomorrow... It's official. Kenzie will be closer to 5 than she is to 4. I can't believe our little baby is going to be turning 5 and becoming an elementary schooler/kindergartener in just a few short months. She is such an amazing little girl. Kenzie at 4-and-a-half is.... ... around 42.5 inches (81st percentile) tall and weighs about 40 pounds (71st percentile). We don't have any formal doc appointments on half birthdays any more so these are my estimates. If they are fairly accurate, they keep her on about the same percentile markers she has been on for the last 2 or so year. Either way, the kid is tall. She is firmly planted in at least size 6 to 7 dresses and pants. She wears a small to medium shirt in kids' sizes. We still have the issue that she is skinnier than she is tall and all her height has remained in her legs it seems so we have to have adjustable waist pants or fold things down if we can to keep them on her hips. She has a couple of pairs of ...

Warning: Long post ahead! I didn't want to split this into two posts so it is just longer than a lot of other ones. So this weekend we undertook a challenge. At least a "challenge" for our little family of four. With a 4-year-old and 2-year-old traveling away from home and staying in a hotel is not necessarily an easy feat. BUT... we had to. See, our friends' little guy turned 1. We had to go down to celebrate with them. They always try to come up for the kids' birthdays if they can and Steven and Mike have been friends for many, many years. We were so excited to celebrate their little man. He's super cute too and we haven't seen them since Kenzie's birthday so our visit was due. The weekend actually started a couple days early because first things first... we had to drop off Jack with Nana and Papa. We ended up going on Thursday afternoon to drop him off. After I picked Kenzie up at school, we came home to let Will nap and then I loaded up the kid...