2015

(21 August 2015)

The Q2 pictures are up!

 

(19 August 2015)

And.... it's been 4 months since my last blog entry. I would feel bad about it except that it is largely due to us spending absurd amounts of time this summer getting licensed to be foster parents. In addition, we've been spending time with two kids who will shortly become our foster children. In the interests of protecting their privacy, very little will be shared online at this time -- but that should be fine for the target audience of this blog. :-)

Major events since last update which are ok to share given the above paragraph:

  • Fox and I celebrated our 12th wedding anniversary by biking the Banks-Vernonia trail
  • We planted some more trees in our orchard and put in a garden. Fox came up with a unique design for the garden, though it will take time to get it all complete. We planted some stuff even without the boxes and are seeing some success!
  • The last bit of outdoor work on the house was completed and it was painted a lovely blue color. Some base lighting was even added to the columns which looks pretty cool.
  • I attended my first Portland Blazer game as well as my first Portland Thunder (arena football) game.
  • I ran two half marathons. I ran the first in 2:26. The second was on a hotter day and on a more hilly course so my time was around 2:50. I'm aiming for around 2:20 for the 3rd one in a few weeks.
  • I ran the local 10k in just over an hour, which wasn't my best but was quite respectable given that I'd been focusing on longer distances at a slower pace. I ran the big 10k through work in about 1:10, which was really hard because it was 93 degrees and I was dying! I was just happy to finish!
  • Some of my Norwegian relatives came to visit!!!!
  • Took our first family mini-vacation: trip to Seattle to see Thomas the train.
  • We finally saw a deer in our back yard!
  • I saw Wicked for the first time, and loved it.

I am working on getting the Q2 pictures ready for posting, as well as the collage of the birthday countdown.

(23 April 2015)

Wha...? 3 months without an entry??? You'd think I was busy trying to keep up with a 3-year-old or something...

But, I did get around to doing a bunch of updates tonight. The Q1 pictures are up! I also updated Cody's page.

As far as big events of the last few months, there are only a few that spring to mind.

  • Cody smashed two fingers between a falling wheelbarrow (in which he was sitting) and the concrete underneath, resulting in a trip to the ER to get it checked out. He's fine, but currently has a bulky dressing on it to help cushion it while it heals.

    Cody with bandaged hand

  • I signed up to do a half-marathon in the fall, the third in a series offered by the Oregon Marathon. Then they added a "virtual" option where you could run two of the three half marathons on your own (within a 2 week time frame) along with one on the actual course and get 4 medals. I couldn't pass that up. The first half is officially scheduled for May 2nd, so I'll have to do it between April 28th and May 13th. I'm not exactly in peak running condition so I'm expecting this one to be a little slow. But I'm oddly giddy at the prospect of seeing improvement as I do each of these three races.

    Half marathon medals

  • At home, we are putting in a garden, with a horseshoe pit in the middle. I foresee many fun horseshoe matches in the future, though we'll obviously need to plant the more fragile food items in the areas farthest from the center. It's not done yet.
  • My husband did a 15-day birthday countdown which was totally awesome. :-)

(14 January 2015)

And... another two months have slipped by without an entry. We had an extraordinarily busy few weeks in December and then my family came into town for the Christmas holiday. I really, really liked geting to know the two nieces on my side of the family. They hit it off with Cody like they'd known him forever and I know Cody loved having more people to run around and play with.

The Q4 pictures are up!

BYU played a nail-biter with Memphis in the Miami Beach Bowl, though they lost in double overtime. It's hard to take a loss but if a loss has to happen, that's a better way than most for it to happen. The bad part was that right after the game ended, a fight broke out. One of the ESPN cameras caught a BYU player punching someone from the other team, though it missed that he was reacting to the other player. Still, he shouldn't have thrown the punch. When I got back to work two weeks later, people were asking me about the fight. That's what they remembered about the game, not how close fought the actual game was. Oy.

Our animals are both happy and healthy. Mikey has obviously developed an affinity for Cody. When Cody spends the night at his grandparents' house, Mikey can often be found laying on a blanket in Cody's room. Cosmo gave us a scare recently, but he's fully recovered now. I sure am glad since it wouldn't be the same here without him.

Read the 2014 entries