8 Years...

....ago today I got married to my best friend.

He is the one person I can tell anything and everything to. He makes me laugh, he makes me cry, and I wouldn't change anything about him!

We got to go out for a grown up dinner and then out for a couple drinks at a local bar. We still got home before 9 but it was great having a bit of grown up time.

We marveled at how much has changed in 8 years....as well as how much has stayed the same.

I also got hit on by a 65 year old man at the bar....with Greg standing right next to me.

Buh Bye!

To the holidays and 2010.

Christmas and New Years flew by in a haze here. Our tree was only decorated on the top half because Owen took all the ornaments off the bottom half. Everyone in our house gained the 5 expected holiday pounds and the boys are so wound up on sugar they are not sure which end is up anymore.

As of yesterday all the decorations are down and packed away....waiting for next year's crazy days. The boys have so many new toys they really don't know what to do with themselves.

Here are some pictures to sum everything up.

Hugh and Owen decorating wooden ornaments by painting them...

 Our tree...

 
Sharing snack time....
 

Goodies made...

 Christmas Breakfast (fritatta & cinnamon rolls) and dinner (ham)

 

  
First snow fall...

Visiting Santa...

  Visiting with Family...

Visiting with friends...

Naughty...(stolen broken candy cane from the tree)

  Nice...

Night before Christmas & new matching jammies...

Christmas morning and gifts....

Still nursing Owen at 19 months!...

Snuggling with Hugh while knitting!...

Soft Star RunAmoc Shoe Giveaway!

I wish I was the one that had enough pull with a company to offer a freebie to everyone out there. It is not me but running and rambling does have that pull! Head on over to put your name in to win a free pair of shoes!

I already have a pair of the RunAmoc Lites with a 5mm trail sole and I LOVE LOVE LOVE them! I special ordered mine so they are black and pink. Who doesn't love pink on a shoe! If I win this contest I will get a suede pair with a street sole for more every day wear.

The leather that the shoes are made of is the softest leather I have ever had the opportunity to feel. Once it is on your feet you forget they are there because they are so soft.

Anyway, go to the site above and try to win your own pair!

Slacking

It seems I have totally given up on blogging that 30 days thing. I'm just going to move on at this point. I may revisit it when I am not so busy with the holidays and life in general.

Running update.

I have completed 5 5k races so far and I have an 8k race this weekend (that is 5 miles for those of you that would rather not do the math). The race this weekend is Cross Country Challenge and I can't wait! It looks like so much fun. I have a good friend from college coming into town to run this with me as well as a neighbor. I actually met the neighbor through the Daily Mile website. We got to meet at my last race...the Turkey Trot here in town.

As of right now my personal records for time are 12:41 on the mile and 39:42 on the 5k.

I have had to buy some minimal shoes for the winter. I love running barefoot but it seems that for this winter my lowest temp is around 40 degrees. I hope to be able to run in colder temps next winter. For shoes I have a pair of Soft Star Run Amoc Lites and a cheap pair of water shoes from Sports Authority. I am working on my shoe review for the Run Amocs now, I'm expecting to be done and have that up in the next couple of days.

Life Update

My mom and I are making fun fabric items and hitting the local craft fairs. We are also selling them online to anyone who is interested. If you are interested just send us a message as to what you want and then send us money to paypal using the e-mail address momnmefabrics@hotmail.com the prices are all listed on the facebook page. If business picks up enough then we may get a "real" website.

On the eating front....Greg and I hosted Thanksgiving this year. The day went as well as can be expected. We only had one major issue and it had nothing to do with the dinner.....our main sewer line backed up and the basement flooded. We were able to call in a plumber and have the line routed out. Turns out that one of the boys flushed a wash rag down the toilet and then the wash rag got stuck in the line because of all the tree roots growing through the pipes from our HUGE tree in the front yard.

The turkey turned out amazing and it was all because of a tip from a friend. We covered the surface of the turkey with bacon before we put it in the oven. As it cooks the bacon fat bastes the turkey so you don't have to. Oh yum it was great!

 Here is my gratuitous food porn picture

100 Books

Have you read more than 6 of these books? The BBC believes most people will have read only 6 of the 100 books listed here.

• Bold those books you've read in their entirety.

• Italicize the ones you started but didn't finish or read only an excerpt.

Tag other book nerds. Tag me as well so I can see your responses! (Or not, after all reading is not a competition! I'm betting that we're all well over 6 books, and I am curious to see the common ground.)

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen

2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien

3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte

4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling

5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee

6 The Bible

7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte

8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell

9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman 

10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens

11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott

12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy

13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller

14 Complete Works of Shakespeare

15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier

16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien

17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulk

18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger

19 The Time Traveler’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger

20 Middlemarch - George Eliot

21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell

22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald

24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy

25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams

27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky

28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck

29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll

30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame

31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy

32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens

33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis

34 Emma -Jane Austen

35 Persuasion - Jane Austen

36 The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe - CS Lewis

37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini

38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres

39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden

40 Winnie the Pooh - A.A. Milne

41 Animal Farm - George Orwell

42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown

43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez

44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving

45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins

46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery

47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy

48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood

49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding

50 Atonement - Ian McEwan

51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel

52 Dune - Frank Herbert

53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons

54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen

55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth

56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon

57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens

58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley

59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon

60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez

61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck

62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov

63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt

64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold

65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas

66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac

67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy

68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding

69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie

70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville

71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens

72 Dracula - Bram Stoker

73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett

74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson

75 Ulysses - James Joyce

76 The Inferno - Dante

77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome

78 Germinal - Emile Zola

79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray

80 Possession - AS Byatt

81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens

82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell

83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker

84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro

85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert

86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry

87 Charlotte’s Web - E.B. White

88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom

89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton

91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad 

92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery

93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks

94 Watership Down - Richard Adams

95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole

96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute

97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas 

98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare

99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl 

100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo



Day 3

Day 3: Something you have to forgive yourself for.

I need to forgive myself for having the 2 c-sections. It eats at me every day. If I had just pushed for the vaginal birth a bit more it may have happened. I feel like a failure for falling into the traps of the medical profession. Logically in my head I know that I have 2 wonderful children and it doesn't matter how they came into the world but it is still something I think about every day. I feel weak for not standing my ground.

Day 2

Day 2 - Something you love about yourself.

I love that I am doing with my life what I wanted to. To be a wife to a wonderful man and to have children and raise them to be amazing people. I also love that I am almost always able to find the "silver lining" in situations. I think my ability to do that has helped to keep the spirits up for myself and my family in darker times.