Running

About 10 weeks ago I ran my first mile. I was able to do it in just under 12 minutes. Eight weeks later I ran another mile. Morgan challenged me to never walk, and I did it in 9 minutes 24-ish seconds.

Yesterday I ran another mile for my current Wellness Challenge. I did it in 8 minutes 56 seconds.

I am really proud of myself for getting better and being stronger. My friends and I are doing the Couch to 5K program, except we do each week twice. Now that we are in week 5 things are a little different so we do each day twice.

Today we had to run 8 minutes walk 5 then run 8 again.  I just did my mile at the beginning of our 8 mile run and ran until I finished it.  The second 8-miles were so much harder. But next monday we'll do it again and then Wednesday and Friday of next week we will be jogging for 20 minutes straight...no walking allowed.

I am a little scared of doing this, but excited too. Today was the first work-out that I felt sick afterwards. Which I know isn't exactly something you should be shooting for, but it is good to know that I really pushed my body to the limit.

On the bonus side I started this week weighing 150 pounds. I had been that for a couple weeks and I guess now is when my body is ready to get past that plateau and lose more weight because this morning I was 146.6.  It is strange to think that I might actually get to 140 by the time these next 7 seven weeks are over.

Also, as I was cutting Morgan's hair today I told him how I thought it would be fun to once I reach 140 (or lower, I haven't decided for sure) but to cut my hair OFF and have a total make-over.  I had a pixie-type cut before which I really liked and Morgan said that he really liked it too and had encouraged me to cut it that short.  So I may be cutting off all of my hair in the near future.

This is an old picture, but my hair is about the same length. 

I could do something like this...

Or something like this?

Maybe I'll do something a little longer like this.

Or something super short, like this. 

First Day of School

School has started again!  At least for Eli.  Josh will start next Tuesday. But for now I tried to make Eli's first day back a special one. We had German Pancakes, grape juice and strawberries for breakfast. We even rode our bikes to school for the first day.

Sorry for the weird smiles.  It is hard for Eli to smile naturally on cue.

Eli's sign says "First day of First grade 2012, August 16 2012"

And here are some shots of Noelle and Josh from this morning.

Eli's Birthday!

We wanted to make Eli's birthday special this year without going too overboard since we had bought him a bike for his B-day at the beginning of the summer.  He had a friend party last year so that was out of the question.

Instead we decided to take him to Chuck E Cheese where he had a lot of fun playing games and eating pizza. He managed to get a lot of tickets and earned a nerf-type gun.

Afterwards we had presents, cake and ice cream at home. Eli got stuff he needed for school: a backpack and a lunch box. He also got a baseball.

Date Day

Today Morgan and I went on our weekly date. We went shooting at a local outdoor gun range. We both shot our pistols, Morgans .40 and my 9mm. It was a lot of fun. After we shot our handguns we moved over to the shotgun range. Morgan had me throw the clay pigeons. He is a really good shot.

Morgan did convince me to shoot the shotgun too. I was a little nervous about it, I think I have only shot a .22 before. I did one shot first, just to try it, and I survived. After Morgan shot more clay pigeons he gave me the shotgun with 3 shells in it. I managed to hit 1 one of the clay pigeons that he threw for me.

I had to take a break after that from shooting. The gun is really heavy and had a decent kick. Later I shot five rounds and hit 2 of the clays Morgan threw. We will definitely do that again.


Afterwards we still had some time before we needed to get back to the babysitter so we went to a furniture store to look at rugs. We are going to tear up the carpet in the living room and paint the walls. We were able to find a 5x7 rug on sale so we decided to buy it. Then we went to Four Queens to get a smoothie and a shake.



The rest of our date will happen tonight. We are going to go on a Light up the Night bike ride in Cedar Falls. It is a 8.8 mile bike ride with glow sticks along the path. We had to buy lights for our bikes so we can go on it, but I am pretty excited to give it a try. It is going to be a lot of fun.

You don't know this, but I usually come to my blog once a day. I have my list of family and friend's blogs and I like to see if anyone has updated theirs. I know there are probably easier ways for me to do this, but this is what works for me.

When I come check my site out I usually feel bad that I haven't updated in a while. But since the camera is broken I am having a more difficult time with it all. We do have another, older camera and have started taking some pictures with it. However, I have no idea where the connected cable is to the computer to upload the pictures so I don't really deal with the camera at all. And pictures with my ipod-thing don't seem to be that great so I am not going to start using that full time.


It is time to give you some update news, though.

First, I finished the 8-week wellness challenge that I was a part of. My team ended 4th in a competition of 6, but we actually got a lot of points, and had we been in other competitions we would have done better. We could have one by 1000 points in one competition and gotten second place by 1000 points in the other competition.

But it is what it is, and I wasn't going into the challenge to try to win big. But it did make me feel more positive about my team and the hard work that we did.



2nd update: Morgan is now the Elder's quorum president in our ward and I am the secretary of the Young Women. It is a new challenge for us, but we are both looking forward to the growth we will have. So far I have been keeping Noelle with me during YW and Morgan has had to still teach Sunday School. Maybe once we get a replacement Sunday School teacher I will have him trade off taking care of Noelle though.  Although, there are only like 4 more months until she is old enough for nursery.  Crazy, eh?


3rd - Part of the instruction that Morgan received from the stake president when he was called was to take me out on dates once a week. We decided to combine that counsel with my reward of a movie night from my wellness challenge and go to a movie and dinner.  (We did a matinee, so it comes first.)

We went to see Dark Knight Rises. There were only about 6-8 people in the theater for that matinee showing. I don't know if it was because it was a matinee, or because people are afraid to see that movie in the theater. I know that I was a little nervous sitting there, thinking about what happened in Aurora, Colordo.

But I got over it and REALLY enjoyed the movie.  It was excellent. There were so many things that I felt were perfect about the film. I don't want to go into them here because I don't want to give anything away.  It felt less dark than The Dark Knight. It definitely seemed a lot less violent to me. Now Morgan and I want to go back and watch the previous two films again.  I sort of wish that we had watched them prior to seeing the movie so we could be completely up to date.

That will be my recommendation to you.  Watch Batman Begins, The Dark Knight and then The Dark Knight rises.  It will be worth your effort.