SHERMAN AVE

After our run yesterday, Christina and I planned to take the kiddos to ride bikes and play at the new playground at Sherman Avenue school while the guys ran this morning. We spent a little over 2 hours playing and had surprisingly nice weather for August in Mississippi (upper 70s with a breeze! - it was still crazy humid, but it felt so much better than usual). The new playground equipment (actually a year old, we just hadn't been back since they refurbished the school's playground) was pretty great, with the swings and spinning seat thing (which us adults could only tolerate in short spurts) being the biggest hits. All the kids got on their bikes a few times, which was a relief to all us adults who haven't been able to convince them to ride in the summer heat and humidity much - it was good to see they haven't forgotten their skills!

We had to dry off all the equipment when we first arrived due to yesterdays storms

Daddy ran down the hill from the "parking lot" across from The Flats to join us (we had packed a cooler and brought him a hot breakfast!)

Don't worry, he fell off on purpose

All 4 kiddos on their bikes

 Speedy Gonzales ran a few laps when she got tired of her bike

SO MUCH FOR THE PREEMPTIVE STRIKE!

The city did some preemptive branch trimming along power lines in our neighborhood (and elsewhere around town and out here in the county) while we were in California, in anticipation of future storms. They got a test storm this afternoon, and no sooner had the rain started and the wind picked up (when I walked outside to check on Jay's brewing setup in the carport) than the power went out at the house. Womp womp. Luckily we'd already cooked and eaten lunch, and it was basically naptime (mommy enforced, since mommy was tired from a 17 mile run this morning), so I just corralled the kids into Cora's bed with me and we passed a couple hours snuggled in the dark. When we woke up, the power was surprisingly still out. Entergy estimated a 4:00pm restart, so to pass the next half hour or so we went for a walk around the neighborhood to see if we could find any fallen branches or trees. Nothing on our streets (other than the fascinating caterpillar nests pictured below), even though Entergy stated that it was only our neighborhood in all of Vicksburg that was without power. It's always us! When the power didn't come back on at 4:00pm, we checked with Entergy and learned the new ETA was 11:00pm, so we bailed on our plans to cook dinner and headed up to The Hat. See? It's not all bad when the power goes out. You get candlelight baths and Mexican food for dinner!

 Wearing some new shirts from Gramma to dinner and looking mighty cute!

GETTING A HEAD START...

Since Christmas is only 4 months away, Cora decided she should get a head start on her letter to Santa...

A G A P E

 Spirit Day brought the request for "fancy hair" this morning.

Also a good excuse to show the back side of AMCA's new school shirts.

THREE TIMES

James insists that we check on him THREE times after we put him to bed at night (and before we go upstairs to go to bed ourselves). He's usually asleep by the first time we check on him, and usually he's laying in crazy positions with his blanket tangled around his legs and at least one pillow and/or stuffed animal on the floor, so I couldn't resist going to get my camera when I found him so sweetly snuggled with both his lovies. 

The whale is the same Dr. Seuss whale that Robyn and Stephen sent him many years ago, and he often uses it as a little pillow. The dinosaur belonged to Jay 30+ years ago and James REQUIRES him at night because "his job is to keep the bad dreams away". He has a system too... the whale and dinosaur have to be positioned as seen above, and he almost always falls asleep with his arm hooked around both of them.

UNEXPECTED

Baby Doll was complaining about ear pain when I picked her up from school, so I checked her out with the otoscope when we got home and didn't see anything, but found some ear drops in the cabinet and put a few in regardless. I asked her to lay still for a few minutes while I walked Buster so the drops could soak in, and when I came back inside she was asleep. 4:15pm naps are quite unexpected these days, but I decided to just let her sleep since her report card showed a skipped nap at school today anyway. James loved the excuse to quietly watch a couple of shows while she napped for an hour!

No fever, but she and I have both been battling allergy-type symptoms for the past week.

PURPLE DANCER

Since she outgrew some of her leotards, she got to pick a new one for this dance semester. There were a few girls in lavender at her first class, so she decided she wanted to be a "purple dancer". (I think she still prefers her black leotard because it matches Miss Bridgett, but I think she looks sweet in purple.)

I swear I don't ask her to pose like this... I actually don't ask her to pose at all...

After dance, we went to the gym to swim at the indoor pool with Will and Lauren (since the outdoor pool is already closed on weekdays now that school has started back), then Jay and I ran around the track for a bit while the kids hung out in the daycare. We're hoping to start doing our speedwork sessions together on Wednesdays after work, since speedwork is generally just no fun at all, but having company makes it more bearable! The timing should work out fine (as long as double soccer practices don't overlap dance class day) and we're very lucky in that the kids are big fans of the YMCA daycare (probably because they get to hang out with friends they don't see at school, and because they get to watch shows/movies on weekdays...). In fact, now that Jay isn't doing spin class anymore (he wants to spend more days running and less days cross training), the kids are at the Y less often, which has already caused a few meltdowns because they want to go so badly!

POST-SHOWERTIME RANDOMS

Cora calls nail polish "nail-tail polish" and no amount of correcting her will get her to change her mind. She's recently started painting her own toes with nail-tail polish, but only the almost clear bottle (extremely light pink with sparkles) we have, a Hello Kitty bottle she got for her birthday last year. She applies approximately 23 coats of it before I finally finish brushing my teeth and hair and cut her off. At least it all seems to stay on her feet (not necessarily on her nails) and she doesn't argue (much) for darker colors.

James has been practicing for his Halloween costume (the spiky hair, not the tongue)

SHOWER WEEK!

If we haven't mentioned here yet, Aunt Sandy is getting married! Just 2 months to go and we celebrated accordingly this week with bridal showers via the work folks as well as her local buddies. 

Shower #1 was back on Wednesday and Jay's team set up a really nice party at Martin's (our favorite restaurant!)

Will and James acting like the awesome, calm, older brothers that they are, happily playing on LeapPads and iPhones for the duration of the 3 hour event. They win in the "ease of supervising preschoolers" department.

Cora made sure to get into the laps or arms of at least half the party attendees, LeapPad or not. She always wants to be the center of attention lately (who would have thought she'd ever be like this, way back when she was a super shy 18-month-old afraid of everyone except her mama and daddy?) She of course needed a few minutes with Aunt Sandy!

Lauren found the stack of kid games and James tried to show her how to play the penguin game.

Half the crowd at present opening time!

Barrett and Sandy in front of the crowd

A very cool set of mugs handmade by a local artist

There's nothing better than a 4-year-old bellied-up to the bar, eh? Don't worry, it was a private party so there were no regular restaurant goers to judge us. She happily colored a few of the coasters as we shut down the party at 7:45pm...

Lauren took a turn at the bar too.

 Shower #2 was hosted by Ned and Mary Beth, and Lauchlin and Olivia. The kids had an absolute blast playing with their buddies and hanging out in David's room most of the afternoon/evening.

Teeter-tottering with David

Adding Lauren and Will and little Houston to the mix

Getting a lesson in sea creature names from David

Sweet little Mary Claire stole everyone's hearts, as usual

As soon as she noticed my camera, she turned a series of amazing grins my way. This girl knows she's adorable!

Yup, everybody's favorite kid is MC!

Lauren was so jealous of Christina holding MC! She retreated to the couch and Cora followed, but was of course uncooperative in my attempt at a cute girl photo... Thanks for that Baby Doll. P.S. This is the face I'm going to blow up and show at the rehearsal dinner of your wedding someday, just so you know...

 Congratulations Sandy and Barrett! We can't wait until the big day!!

GATORBAIT TRIATHLON

A couple weeks before we went on vacation, Jay got recruited to be the 10K runner in a GatorBait Triathlon relay team. I was excited because I've wanted to check out this particular event (and learn what a triathlon is all about) since it first started a few years ago, but I didn't want to run it myself (knowing what the weather is typically like here in August, the fact that the runners generally don't even START their event until 9:00am - in the more extreme heat, and how other runners I know who have competed have felt during the days following the race...) We got up at 5:00am, threw the kids in the car at 5:45am, and headed up to Eagle Lake so that Jay could be there for the pre-race meeting and get his team number Sharpie'd onto his arm and leg.

During the pre-race meeting, the kids and I watched the kayak support crew head out to their posts along the 1-mile swim route (a big triangle of giant buoys, adjacent to the mid-lake group of trees where alligators are often spotted - hence the name of the event).

Swimmers heading to the starting line after the meeting.

Last minute instructions for the swimmers. (The kids and I had ventured out onto the pier at this point for a better view.)

Wave #1 (the faster triathletes) entering the water.

Watching the sunrise behind us.

Wave #3 (the relay team swimmers) out at the starting point, awaiting the horn. If you zoom in, you can see waves #1 and #2 out there at the buoys ahead of them with their 4 minute and 2 minute leads.

After Jay's relay team swimmer (a high school girl) came out of the water and through the transition gate (pretty early on), we moved into the shade to hang out while their relay team biker headed onto the course. The swimmers did 1.5k, the bikers did 40k, and the runners did 10k. GatorBait is an Olympic distance triathlon.

Warming up along the lake front about 30 minutes before his expected "baton" pass (really a pass of the ankle velcro chip timer).

At this point we realized that the finish line for the runners was actually a few hundred yards around the lake, not there at the transition area where we'd been parked in the shade, so we loaded up and headed over just in time to see the first runners start to come by. Poor things that were doing the full triathlon solo looked DONE already and quite a few joked with me that they could just make a quick right turn into the finish, right?! I felt compelled to tell them all how awesome they were and that they were in the final stretch and that they looked strong (some really did!)

This guy, who ALWAYS carries an American flag during races, does pretty much all of our local (or semi-local) events. He did the full triathlon today and was one of the first guys out of the water. (Side note: Christina and Sophie and I totally beat him during the Mississippi Blues Marathon - though he had done another marathon the weekend prior...)

Tom ran the 10K for his relay team, which came in second place overall.

There's my Jay at the start of his race, already hot, but still smiling!

This was an extremely unforgiving course... 6.2 miles in the "feels like 100+ degrees" heat, due to humidity over 75%, and not a single meter of shade over the entire out-and-back course along the lakeshore road. This was Jay's view the whole time, plus a bunch of work trucks (even semis) going past the runners on that 2-lane road...

The first runner back was a triathlete (not a relay runner). Check out his time...

The guy cracked me up in his rubber ducky speedo...

There goes Beth, looking like she's just flying along, heading out from the start shortly after that first triathlete finished. Her relay team was running behind due to a slow swim, but she made up a lot of time on the running course.

While daddy ran, the kids played their LeapPads in the shade until Alex showed up, then they ran wild and crazy.

We walked up a hundred yards or so to wait for daddy to appear on the horizon and the kids blew bubbles (in between runners) while they waited, and gave a few runners high-fives (who still had energy left to lift their hands, and there weren't many... I've never seen so many people walk within sight of the finish line, if that tells you how rough the conditions were for this race).

Here comes daddy!

Trying to give daddy high-fives. He tried to return them, and to smile for the camera, but as you can see from the photo he succeeded at neither. His heartrate got higher during this race than it ever has previously according to his Garmin, even during speedwork sprints. He played it safe and covered his Garmin with a piece of tape so that he'd run off feel rather than aim for a specific time goal, and I'm glad he did so that he didn't push himself too hard in the heat.

Chasing daddy to the finish line!

He was so happy to see that finish line... He immediately poured an ice cold bottle of water over his head and grabbed a second to drink, followed by Gatorade and a few other choice beverages. Luckily the aid stations were every mile along the course and he was able to pour water on his head at each. One aid station even had ice cold towels to cool the runners off. I can tell you that just about ever runner I saw cross the finish line headed straight for the grass to lay down...

Jay's relay teammates: Carly and Fred

This is how Cora reacted to her 5:30am wake-up call... she crashed just 2 minutes from the ice cream shop, poor thing! Thankfully she was willing to eat some lunch once we got home, then go back to sleep (we all napped for a couple hours). The heat and humidity around here in the summer just really does you in...

 The verdict? It was cool to see a triathlon in action (I've read lots about them, not that I have any interest since I don't like swimming or biking), the GatorBait seemed well run and the athletes were well supported, and their awards podium surrounded by tractors (the event is sponsored by a local tractor supply store) was very cool. However, August is just a RIDICULOUS time of year to do this type of event in the Deep South, and Jay will absolutely not be doing it again (and I certainly won't be volunteering myself either!)