What was I thinking??? I’m supposed to run a 13 mile race in less than 12 days. Who runs 13 miles? For fun? I’ve never run that far in my life. I might actually die. Seriously — I felt this pain in my left side the other day while running…I could maybe have had a small heart attack. I think I did. I’d better take it easy for a few days.

I panicked like this once before — right before I ran my first 10k a few years ago. I said all of the above to Chris, who told me that it didn’t matter if I finished or not. That I had worked very hard and that everyone would be proud of me and love me regardless of whether I ran the entire thing or walked it. A  very compassionate response. A loving, understanding response. A totally, totally wrong response. He has since been made to understand that it is his job as Head Cheerleader to lie, lie, lie. His new response when I start saying these things is “I have no doubt you can do anything you set your mind to.” If I told him I was going to run Pikes Peak tomorrow before breakfast, I’m pretty sure this would now be his response. Smart man.

Though come to think of it, when he told me it was okay if I didn’t finish, I thought to myself, “What? You don’t think I can do it? I’ll show you, you….you!” Yep. He was all nice and encouraging and I was all snippy and mad. But if nothing else had gotten me across the finish line, that did. So perhaps he knew what he was about after all.

I’ve been sending notes in the kids’ lunches since they started school earlier this week. Alexis loves getting notes about how much we love her and how much we miss her. Timothy, being older and more cynical (no idea where that came from), would mock any sort of emotional display or hide under the lunch table in embarrassment. So the first day, I sent him a charming little limerick about a guy running away from a bear. He informed me it was not funny. I tried again the second day with the classic guy from Kalamazoo who found a large mouse in his stew. When I asked how he liked it, he rolled his eyes and told me I just wasn’t funny. He said I should include jokes like the one his friend told:

Tim: “Are you PT?  (say ‘no’, Mom)”

Me: “Nooooo.?”

Tim: “You’re not potty-trained?”

Then he laughed for ten minutes.

 

Today’s limerick:

There once was a young boy named Tim,

Whose mother wrote poems for him.

He would often complain

That her poems were quite lame

So she gave up. The end.

Love,

Mom

 

What I Did on My Summer Vacation

We took our first road trip with four kids, that’s what we did. When we lived in California, a road trip was a six hour drive from Southern California to San Jose with a max of two stops if things were really getting crazy. Now that we live in Colorado, a road trip is a 16 hour, thousand-mile trek that requires spending the night somewhere in the desert and packing with the economy and precision I’m pretty sure my dad employed when he built space shuttles.

I always have a momentary freak-out as we’re leaving. I worry that I’ve forgotten something and I continue to worry until I remember something I actually have forgotten and then I can deal and move on. Unless it’s one of the kids, we can improvise. I also panic briefly when I realize I’m in a car for two days with five other people and only one of them is really very responsible and exactly none of them agree with me that farting is not funny (this includes the baby. She thinks it’s hilarious.)

The drive was surprisingly easy considering we had a baby, two older kids and a halfway potty trained kid. He would wait until about 20 miles after the “No Services for 100 miles” sign and then announce loudly he had to go to the bathroom. By the time we got him to one, he would go in, spend about ten minutes inspecting it, then decide he didn’t have to go anymore. Once he was back in the car and we were on the road again, he’d have an accident.

The week at Tahoe was wonderful, which means I don’t have many stories. I have a theory that the worst trips make the best stories. The trips my parents and siblings and I laugh about include the camping trip where my parents forgot the tent poles, tied the tent to a tree and then kept snickering because they could tell everyone walking by was dying to point out they had gotten this whole tent thing wrong but no one did. And my personal favorite — the trip where my parents tried to find everything from a campsite to a place to eat to an ATM in the state of Washington, found none of those things, decided they hated the entire state and drove through the night from Canada to Oregon just to get out of it. As a final grand gesture, they let my seven year old brother go potty against the side of a park restroom at 2 am because they couldn’t find any open bathrooms either. So you see my point — good stories.

I did get a run in while I was up there, which was beautiful. It was sunset and the boats on the water were silhouetted against the orange sky. So pretty. And I got a huge boost from a group of people sitting on the pier who cheered me on and yelled, “Get out of her way! She looks like she could run a marathon, that one! Go, go, go!” My ego was not at all deflated when I realized they were completely high and probably went on to cheer the geese for their amazing swimming as soon as I was gone.

So we had an awesome time that week, hanging out with my parents and getting the kids to the lake every day for swimming and some serious sandcastle building. If it all falls apart for us here for some reason, you’ll find us at the cabin. Unless it’s lunch time in which case I might suggest checking the In-N-Out.