Days 7 and 8

I'm just going to start jumping right in - no explanation needed anymore.

Day 7 - Monday
I'm thankful for
- library day. Last year, our trips to the library were sporadic. This year, I decided to make Monday our library day. Every Monday after lunch, we head to the library. Now we can check out things that are due by the next week without worrying too much about making sure they get returned. As long as we don't forget to take them back. :) The kids like knowing they can get new books every week, too.
-family movie night. We rented Nanny McPhee from the library and enjoyed watching it together with popcorn and some Halloween candy. While we were eating supper, the kids asked if they could watch it and at first I was going to say no because I had gotten it for this weekend but then I realized we had nothing going on so why not?

Day 8 - Tuesday
I'm thankful for
-Rachel's laugh. She got the giggles during supper and I started laughing, just watching her laugh.
- Tori's sense of humor. She snickered at something Brendan said and then imitated him perfectly. We all laughed for several minutes - which I think is what started Rachel's giggle-fest. I love laughing with my family.

Days 4,5, and 6

I think this would be more meaningful if I thought of things to be thankful for on the actual day. It's usually easier to look back and see what you have to be thankful but it's harder when you're in the middle of a long day.

At any rate, here are just a few of my blessings from last week:
Day 4 - Friday
I'm thankful for
- finishing another week of school with the kids! I enjoy so many things about homeschooling but it still feels like a struggle sometimes to get the work done.
- Our children's pastor and his wife and the activities they do for our kids. Brendan and Josh went to a party Friday night so the other 3 kids and I had a movie night.

Day 5 - Saturday
I'm thankful for
- a husband who does the yard work without complaining.
- a son who willingly helps him.
- a neighbor who lets us use his riding lawn mower with a leaf bagger attachment.
- a sunny Saturday perfect for getting leaves picked up.

Day 6 - Sunday
I'm thankful for
- a Sunday School class with young people who like to laugh and learn.
- getting projects done around the house. Have you seen the cubicals at Target with the fabric bins? Love them! I keep thinking of uses for them all over the house. Josh is getting very good at putting these together.

Almost caught up! Just two more to go.

Jumping on the bandwagon

Many people I know are doing this thing where they come up with something to be thankful for every day this month. I resisted at first, because I get this attitude about things like this. Not that I didn't think this was a good exercise, but if I feel like everyone is doing something, I tend to not want to do that. Yes, there are exceptions, glaringly obvious ones, like certain movies I get interested in, but if we start to analyze my behavior, we'll be here all night.

So, back to the point - writing down something every day that you're thankful for. I'm about a week late but I decided tonight it would be good for me to do this. I am having trouble, at times, remembering how truly blessed I am and tonight, while I was reading what some others wrote about being thankful, I felt a strong urge to do this. I decided to do 2 or 3 days at a time until I catch up.

Day 1 - Tuesday
I'm thankful for
- a physical therapist who could correctly diagnose my hip pain and get me on the road to recovery.
- an evening at home with my family.
- a son who works really hard to get caught up with school work that he missed while we were on vacation.

Day 2 - Wednesday
I'm thankful for
- a group of homeschoolers who created a co-op to give homeschool kids some new experiences and to help homeschool parents. I love going to Pioneers once a week and hear about all the interesting things my kids are doing there.
- being able to stay home with my kids every other day of the week. I love Wednesdays but they make me love the rest of the days even more.

Day 3 - Thursday
- the chance to get out with good friends who listen to my long, ridiculous, stories that really have no point and still love me. They make me laugh. They encourage me and help me be the best me possible. They give honest feedback and ask hard questions. And, they work hard to make time to see me. That feeds my soul in an incredible way.

Sometimes it's a really good thing to join the crowd every once in awhile.

A Girl and Her Pony

Tori with Penelope

For several years now, Tori has talked about wanting to learn to ride a horse. We talked about it but weren't exactly sure what to do to get started. What if she didn't like it? How much would we have to buy at the beginning? When would we have time? She was in dance or gymnastics (both one year) and also playing basketball, Brendan was playing football, basketball and baseball, Josh was teaching a class one night a week at the community college, and I needed some time away once in awhile. So we put it off.

Then, last spring a friend emailed me about a homeschool horseback riding club that one of the stables in Jackson was offering. The owner was a homeschool mom and wanted to give kids a 6-week introduction to horseback riding. It was 2 hours in the afternoons for 6 weeks and they would ride for an hour every other week and then do activities and learn the basics of horses and how to care for them for the other hour. It sounded perfect. There was nothing to buy - all equipment could be borrowed. The rate was extremely reasonable. The only catch was, we were really busy during spring. I called anyways. The club was booked already but there was a waiting list and possibly a fall club - were we interested? Yes, yes, yes!

Tori started on Tuesday, September 20th. She went into the barn to learn about horses for an hour while I waited in the van. Then she came outside with a big grin on her face, leading a pony named Penelope. I sent Josh a text saying, "I think we're in trouble." She loved it. Absolutely loved it.

Her 6-week club is now over but her riding lessons are not. She will be continuing lessons at Stepping Stones farm. I'm thankful we had the opportunity to "try them out" first before making a huge commitment and also thankful Tori found something she loves to do.

Happy Halloween!

Raggedy Ann, Raggedy Andy, Butterfly, Football Player

After a wardrobe malfunction (tights that refused to stay up), the Butterfly morphed into a Pirate. And the Pirate complained much less than the Butterfly and all were happy with this transformation. Raggedy Andy had fun but felt a little silly at times and decided that next year, he would be a Football Player. Costumes courtesy of Grandma Judy - except the Football Player.

Meal update

I have mixed reactions about the freezer meal system. There were some that we really enjoyed - the herbed chicken, the chicken nuggets, and the french baked potatoes. There were other meals that have yet to be eaten because they just don't appeal to me - the black bean dinner, mexican chicken lasagna and country captain (chicken with tomatoes and raisins). Then there were some that were okay but not anything I'd make again - the playoff burgers, sopa de maize, and roast. And there was also a meal that was quite time consuming for being a freezer meal - the poppy beef. There were two packages that had to be thawed - the beef mixture and the sauce mixture. Then you had to cook pasta, mix with the sauce, spread the beef in a casserole dish, put the pasta and sauce on top and bake for 30 min! And then I didn't care for it all that much.

I have bought a couple more freezer meal cookbooks and I think it's something I still want to do but definitely not the way I did it this time. I will pick meals that sound really good or ones we've already tried and put together my own list. More work, yes, but my freezer will be less scary to me. :) I think 14 meals is a good amount for a month for us. I also enjoy having bags of cooked chicken and ground beef in the freezer so it's easy to put together tacos, sloppy joes, enchiladas, quesadillas or many other casserole dishes. That also gives me freedom to pick something that sounds good or try something new once in awhile.

I'm hoping to use up a couple more of the leftover freezer meals this week but really not sure when I will have the courage to have the black beans or country captain. I guess as long as I have lots of side dishes, it should be okay, right?

October meal plan

The challenge - to plan a month's worth of meals and to have most of these meals in the freezer ready to go.

Background - I bought a book a couple months ago called "Once-A-Month Cooking". The premise is that you plan a month's worth of meals and then buy all the ingredients and get the meals ready and put them in the freezer - all of this in 1-2 days. Then the rest of the month, all you have to do is thaw the meal for that day and warm it up. It sounded great in theory but I was having trouble setting aside two days to do this and planning that many meals that far ahead. Plus, some of the meals looked strange.

A friend sent out an email that she was going to do this for another friend because of some health issues the family was going through and invited others to help her. I went over to help cut and cook chicken and we talked about the whole idea. She said that she had done it before but instead of doing it all in one day, she did a few meals every night. That seemed more reasonable.

I went home and looked through my cookbook again and found a 2-week plan that I liked. I decided October would be a great month to try it because the kids would be gone one weekend (I generally do very little cooking when they're gone) and then we'd be gone on vacation for 8 days, leaving about 20 days to cook meals. If I did 14 meals in the freezer, that would still leave 7 meals open for eating out or our favorites. I wrote out the meals ideas (in pencil) for the month and copied off the grocery list. It was a bit pricey - I had to buy about 6 spices that I didn't have on hand. It will be interesting at the end of the month to see how my spending compares to the month before.

I started putting the meals together tonight and have the following done:
Chicken Taco Salad
Mexican Chicken Lasagna
Sopa de Maiz
Chicken Nuggets
Herbed Chicken
Country Captain (this one looks strange to me - chicken in a stewed tomato sauce with raisins)
Winter Pot Roast
Farmer's Casserole

Tomorrow I will do the rest:
Denise's Black Beans
Poppy Beef
Playoff Burgers
French Stuffed Potatoes
London Broil
Spaghetti Soup

I will let you know how the meals taste and if this whole experiment was worth it at the end!

13.1 miles, anyone? Part 3

**** You can read part 1 here and part 2 here******

The day of the race: The race was on a Saturday morning. I was pretty nervous but was ready to get it over with. Josh had decided to run it with me for moral support. He hadn't been training but he was consistently running 4 miles several times a week at a much faster pace than me and had also been running 8 miles once a week. We had our ipod shuffles loaded with songs to keep us going. We had our energy bars and coffee for breakfast and lots of water. We had our energy gummy chews for mid-way through the race. We were ready.

We got to the race and signed in and got our shirts. Our extremely bright, neon green shirt. Hmm, so much for wearing that around to proudly proclaim I ran a half marathon! We looked at the map of the course and then waited around for the start. I hate the waiting. The nervous excitement, wondering if I should try and go to the bathroom again, I just hate it. We finally started and it was going good. I was running the pace I wanted to run. It was a bit crowded at first because there were 3 races going on - a 5k, 10k, and half marathon and all of us had started at the same time. At some point, the 5k runners turned around and went back. I inwardly scoffed at how little they had to run and how great I still felt. Then the 10k runners turned back and I was a little envious but still feeling pretty good.

The course was a bit confusing but there were people standing there, pointing out the direction we should go. Sometimes there would be arrows on the ground and we assumed those were for us. There weren't many runners after the 10k group turned around. We stayed just behind one runner for quite awhile and passed some others when we would loop around the course. We were never in a big pack after the first few minutes. I thought it was nice not having other runners to worry about but later I began to re-think that.

Josh was having no trouble keeping up with me. It was a bit annoying at times. I ran out of things to talk about and he's never really been one for small talk so he decided to listen to his shuffle. I never really knew this about him until that day but he's really loud when he has headphones in. He tried to tell me what song he was listening to but he was shouting it. Then he even started singing along.

Right around mile 9, I started dragging. I didn't want to do it anymore. We were all by ourselves. I was tired. Josh made the comment, "Huh, it looks like the it's a gradual increase along here." I told him that was NOT helpful. Then he walked beside me. I had slowed down so much that he could walk next to me while I was jogging. This was a tad discouraging, too. He tried to rally my spirits but for some reason, it had the opposite effect on me. I even stopped running and walked for a bit.

That was the opposite of how I wanted the race to go. After a couple minutes of walking, I decided to turn on my shuffle. I'm not sure why I didn't turn it on sooner. I guess I just didn't want to mess with it and wanted to stay focused. It helped immediately though. I heard the music and started jogging again and was focused on finishing. We headed back into the woods that we had gone through at the beginning of the course but this time, there were no helpful people pointing us in the right direction. There was one runner ahead of us that we followed for awhile and then passed him. After we passed him, there was a fork in the trail, and we took the one less traveled, which was the wrong one. Or maybe we took the one more traveled - either way, it was wrong. We had to backtrack a little bit to get on the right trail and I was discouraged.

I started walking again and then we saw the finish. Right there! It was so close! We could see the flags! And then Josh pointed out we had to go all the way around the parking lot and I wanted to stop. It just felt too cruel. We still had to run a half mile, which seemed so much farther, when we could see the finish line!

Josh had his GPS watch on and said that we would technically finish 13.1 miles before the finish line so I told him to stop the watch when it said 13.1 because I wanted to know the real time, counting our extra distance for backtracking because of a poorly marked course. It still wasn't a great time. 2:21.30, which averages out to about 10:45 a mile. It's certainly not bad for someone who ran a 5k (3.1 miles) 2 years ago and did that at an 11:00 minute mile pace. But I had been training at a 10:00 minute mile pace and was hoping to do around there or better. So my first thoughts when I finished weren't full of pride and accomplishment. I was unhappy with my time and upset that I had walked. It wasn't the race I wanted to run. I said afterwards that it was just too long of a race for me.

We went to get a drink but all the water and food were gone. Another major disappointment. So we drank the water we had brought ourselves and then went through a drive-thru to get a chocolate milk. We came home and a friend called me to see how it went. I told her my time and that I had walked part way and wasn't super happy about it and didn't plan to run another race that long. She was very encouraging, reminding me of how far I'd come in a short amount of time, and said she wouldn't be surprised if I changed my mind within the week. I took a shower and realized that I wasn't that sore. I didn't actually feel too bad. I JUST RAN 13.1 MILES AND FELT OKAY! And that's when I realized, I was going to run a half marathon again sometime. I was going to run one that was better marked and better attended so I was never wondering which way to turn. I would turn my music on sooner this time. I would know what to expect and would train harder and I would run it faster. Because I am a runner!

5 things I learned at jury duty

1. Don't wear a belt. Because then when the security alarm goes off, you have to take off the belt and walk back thru. And then put the belt back on. And then you feel like you're getting dressed in the courthouse, which isn't really a good thing.

2. People will clip their nails in the courtroom. I find this both disrespectful and kind of gross so I wouldn't recommend it. Besides, how did those make it past security? But there was a prospective juror clipping her nails in the courtroom. Eww.

3. Real lawyers aren't like tv lawyers. Some talk just like me! I guess I expected them to talk like they were reading off a great script (or an average script) but they weren't all that eloquent. And some look like a kid playing dress-up. Or maybe that's because I'm getting older.

4. There are a lot of messed up people out there. And I'm not just talking about the ones on trial. I'm talking about the jurors and the experiences they talked about that were related to the trial. I have had a cushy life and it's good to be reminded of that and to not take it for granted.

5. Jury duty isn't as scary as you think. It is something I have been dreading because I would have to go by myself and had no idea what to expect but they explained everything thoroughly and I began to really get interested in the court proceedings and watching the lawyers decide who to let go and what questions to ask. It's fascinating for someone who likes to analyze human behavior. Then they would dismiss someone and a new name would be selected and I'd start sweating a bit, wondering if it'd be me and what they would ask me. But my name was never selected and both sides were happy with their jury so I was home in time for lunch.

I remember my dad taking me to the courthouse when I was younger - 5th grade, I think? - just to see a trial. The judge was funny and kind of sarcastic, very matter of fact. I was remembering that experience today and how much more interesting it is to actually be there instead of just reading about it. You begin to understand the implications of the whole court process and that it affects real people. It's definitely something I want to do with our kids. One more field trip to add to the list for our school year.

Our summer

Tori rides the Huckleberry Railroad with Shelby

Rachel and Seth with Owen and Josh behind them


Brendan gets to drive Uncle C.R.'s tractor at Pines of Paradise

Brendan was asked to play on the all-star baseball team for the tournament. I won't lie, that was pretty cool. They lost the 1st game, won the 2nd and then lost the 3rd.

Blake, Brendan and Travis on the train

Rachel and Owen ham it up for the camera

Tori also gets to drive Uncle C. R.'s tractor at the resort! He is a brave, brave man.

We spent a week at Pines of Paradise in Carp Lake, MI, and had a wonderful time with family. Even though it was crazy hot (northern Michigan should not be that hot - ever!) and the mosquitoes were out in full force (my new favorite t-shirt came from up there and it says "Vampire of the North" with a picture of a mosquito on it), we had a great time boating, swimming, jumping in some crazy waves in Lake Michigan and getting to know our family again. I love seeing my kids running off with my cousins kids and knowing they're making memories of their own to exchange at future reunions.

Later in July, we borrowed a camper from our friends and camped with Josh's family at a really nice campground in Otisville. It's a small town close to Mt. Morris, which was hosting the Warrior Dash this summer. The Warrior Dash is a 5k race with obstacles - just little things like running over tires and old cars, through a mud bog, climbing a ridiculously high rope wall, and jumping over fire. You know, no big deal. Josh and his brother Jake thought it sounded like *fun* (this is why I am generally skeptical whenever Josh has a suggestion of something *fun* to do - I also am skeptical if he says something is not spicy - there are certain things we will always disagree on). I will give them this - the race was fun to watch! The campground was great - nice biking trails, a small, shallow lake for the kids to play, lots of shade, and some chiggers to bite our ankles and make us scratch like crazy. Ahh, camping. :) We also discovered that the campground was only 15 minutes from Birch Run! That made up for the crazy chiggers. And we discovered a new bar and grill that had just opened and they weren't scared off at all when we walked in and said there was 18 of us and more than half were kids. I believe the name of it was Otie's. Best BLT pizza I've ever had!

Okay, that is a brief update on what we've been up to. Other big news this summer - my little baby brother got married! It's hard to believe he's that old. Their wedding was beautiful. It was neat to see Brendan as a junior groomsman and remember my brother as the junior groomsman at my wedding. I have one very big regret - I didn't make sure my camera battery was charged and it died Saturday morning with no spare and no charger with me. I'm looking forward to seeing the pictures that others took and hoping to get some copies from them. The best part of the day - watching Rachel dance on the boogie bus we rode after the wedding to the reception! It was so out of character for her. She was a dancing machine and didn't care who was watching. It was a special weekend for all of us.

And now, we're starting our school year! But that will be another post.