Misc Will Update

It seems like Will is learning something new every day now. He's repeating almost every word we say (which can get a bit dangerous!), he knows all of the capital letters, almost all of his colors (red, blue, green, black, white, brown, purple, yellow), and lots of shapes (star, circle, oval, triangle, square). He loves pointing out what color everything is. He's not quite so big on identifying shapes. I really thought he didn't know what a lot of them were until we went to a program at the zoo last weekend that focused on shapes. They handed out little laminated cards in different shapes and asked the kids to hold up various shapes. He got almost all of them immediately (we had a little trouble with the square at first, but he was on top of that one too after a few minutes). Here I was thinking all he knew was star and sometimes triangle, but I think it's just that he doesn't care to identify them for me when I ask. He's a little bit stubborn :-) I'm trying to get him to start counting now, but it's slow going. I don't think it's actually clicked with him what we're doing. Every time I ask him how many of something there are he always says "two". When we try to count to three together he refuses to say "one" for some reason. It's just "two, three".

He is OBSESSED with balloons. The grocery store we go to seems to think it's a great idea for some reason to put helium-filled mylar balloons around the store, which has made grocery shopping with Will a NIGHTMARE. He wants to stop and see all of the balloons. They're practically in every aisle. And there's bunches of them in each spot. So when I say he wants to see all of the balloons, I mean all of the balloons. We have to stop at each bunch and individually hold and examine each of them. If he had his way we would touch these balloons for like 3 hours. I've tried telling him that some of them are too high and we can't reach them, but that only works about half the time. So the other day we're in there and I see a kid in a cart carrying around a balloon with the store's name on it. Well, clearly these people have been holding out on me. After a little bit of research I realized that they give out free helium balloons to kids at the floral department. Problem solved. Now we just stop and get a balloon at the beginning of each trip and life is good. He still wants to stop and examine some of the balloons around the store, but it's much more limited. I've never seen him get as excited about anything as getting a balloon at the grocery. It's really cute. Now if only the bank would stop putting balloons in their lobby we'd be OK.

Now that I'm feeling a lot better I'm determined to get back into a workout routine. I did a great job of getting back on the horse last week... and then promptly fell off again.

Sunday - 4 miles run

Monday - chest, back, and abs at the gym

Tuesday - 3.6 mile run

Wednesday - prenatal yoga

Thursday - 30 minutes elliptical

Friday - rest

Saturday - rest (Had to do the zoo thing in the morning instead of running. Planned to run Sunday, but....)

Sunday - rest (SICK!)

Monday - P90X arms & shoulder video

And tonight I'm supposed to do a 35 minute run with the girls so hopefully we're back on track.

The next big project is getting Will's "big boy room" ready. I ordered some bedding last night, and once that comes I'm going to order some train, car, and truck wall decals to match. There's still so much do to, though. We have to get the room and closet cleaned out, pick out paint and paint, buy him a dresser (I'm going to use an old twin bed my parents have), get a rail for the bed, paint his little rocking chair, figure out toy storage, buy wall decorations, get a bedside lamp... the list goes on and on. I'm very overwhelmed at this point. I know I still have a long time, but I'm sure it will fly, and home decor is not really my strong suit so it just overwhelms me, in general.

Will's First Composition

A little music for your Friday...

My brother, Mike, gave Will this harmonica for Christmas. He has been fascinated yet baffled by it for over 5 months now. Today we finally had the breakthrough of figuring out how to blow into it. He was ecstatic.

Flying Pig 2011

Well, my race didn't go horribly, but it definitely didn't go as well as I had hoped. To start with, it rained. AGAIN. Two years in a row. Mother Nature's just kind of a bitch, I think. It wasn't as bad as last year, though. It was raining pretty hard at the start, but not torrential or anything and it tapered off pretty quickly. I'm not sure that it ever completely stopped raining, but we mostly just got drizzled on. I put body glide in every possible place on my body in anticipation of this so I thankfully did not end up with any chaffing. I was only out there for 2 1/2 hours, though. Some of my friends who ran the full marathon were out there for 5+ hours and they weren't quite as fortunate. Also, it wasn't cold, which was nice. Forty degrees and rainy is definitely a different story than 65 degrees and rainy. I was freezing my butt off in the wind and huge drops of cold water before we started running, but once we were off I don't think I thought about temperature even once.

For fun, I wore a "Baby on Board" sign on my back. It was nice because lots of people along the course that I ran near told me congratulations or asked how far along I was. Just kind of a nice diversion and it's always nice to be able to connect with the other runners somehow. A few other women told me about how they had run races when they were pregnant, and I actually ran along side a woman for awhile who was doing the full who was 5 months pregnant. That's just craziness!

Here we are at Paul Brown Stadium before the start of the race. The start of the race did not go well this year. It was the first year that they tried to institute a corral system (they called them "Pig Pens"). I commend them on trying to do this because last year there definitely were a lot of issues with walkers and slower runners being up WAY too far and blocking the faster runners' way. The problem was that the corrals were not organized well and there was little to no instruction on how to enter them. It's hard to explain, but let's suffice it to say that we ended up having to jump a fence 1 minute before the gun went off to even get into the starting area and weren't even in the right damn corral. We were supposed to be in D and ended up starting in C. I think we actually ended up in a decent pace area, though, because other than 5-10 groups of walkers (which still pissed me off) we were mostly with people that were running our same pace. It definitely seemed more crowded this year, though, so the larger number of people in general just made it frustrating. It's difficult to keep a steady pace and really get into your groove when you're constantly having to worry about stepping on the person in front of you or how to best maneuver around a slower group of runners. It really didn't thin out at all until after the half/full split which is almost 9 miles in.

I ran the whole thing with my friend Beth and with her friend Krissy. Krissy has a little boy who is around 8 months old. She designed little t-shirts for all three of the kids to wear. They had pigs on them and said "Run Mommy Run". So cute! Despite instruction from all three of us to all three of our husbands, though, they somehow managed to "forget" to take a picture of the three of them together wearing their shirts. The running mommies were not happy. All three babies were out on the course cheering us on, though, which was fun.

Here I am around mile 8 visiting with Will and Tim for a few minutes. You can see Will's little shirt. I'm so glad they were able to come out and cheer me on. But this, my friends, was the beginning of where things just went to hell. I'm not sure what happened, but right around the half/full split when we were on Woodburn (mile 9 or so) I started having some SERIOUS aches and pains. I've never experienced this before. When I worry about having a bad run it's because I'm worried about being out of breath or feeling fatigued so that my legs are heavy, etc. I've never actually worried about feeling like my body was falling apart. I mean, that's for people in mile 24 of a marathon. Not around mile 9 of a half. I couldn't even begin to count how many times I've run 9 miles and I have never had this issue. I've run 10 or more miles at least dozen times. I ran 12 miles 2 weeks ago. WTF??? Well, I'll tell you what. This baby is what. Clearly, those extra two weeks of pregnancy did me in. The biggest issue was my hip flexors, especially my left one. It pretty much just stopped working. Have you ever tried to walk without functioning hip flexors? Yeah, it's not pretty. On top of that I had a lot of round ligament pain in my pelvic area that was really uncomfortable. And then my random left Achilles thing started acting up too. I think each one of these issues by itself I could have handled, but all three together was horrible. And then I kept thinking how I had 4 miles to go, how I felt like I was holding Beth and Krissy back because I really couldn't do more than an 11 min/mile or so pace, etc. I definitely started going into a mental downward spiral. But they stuck it out with me and every mile down I knew I was closer to the finish. As cheesy as it sounds, I really had to dig deep on this one. It wasn't pretty.

My official time was 2:23:48 which is a 10:59 pace. That's about 3 minutes slower than when i ran this race last year (my first half marathon) and more than 15 minutes slower than my fall half marathon (which, to be fair, is a much flatter course). I definitely wasn't out to set any records by any means, and I had definitely mentally prepared myself that this was going to be a slow one. I just don't understand how I can run all of the training runs (10 miles, 11 miles, 12 miles) in little to no pain at a 10:15 or so pace and then this is what shows up on race day. I know that Beth had the same quandary.

I did have fun, though. I felt great for the first 9 miles. There were TONS of people out cheering us on. They had some fun signs too. One of my favorites said, "Your feet hurt because you're kicking so much ass". I love it!

One of the best parts of the day, though, was actually going (hobbling more like) to mile 21 of the full marathon course to cheer on Katie and Karen.
They stopped to visit with us for a few. They looked really great and, despite being in pain, were in great spirits. Apparently their run also went to hell around this point, but they finished and had a great time doing it and I'm so proud of them!!

Unfortunately, the pain I was in during the race only got worse as the day went on. I seriously could barely walk for most of the rest of the day. I went to work yesterday (Monday), but it wasn't pretty. Today is the first day that I can actually walk normally and am not in a lot of pain. My Achilles is still bothering me a bit, but I'm icing it and I'm sure it will calm down.

Not sure what's next for me. I want to keep running as long as I can, but will definitely be keeping it to 3-4 mile distances. It's hard to stay motivated without a race or a training group, though, so we'll see how it goes. I ran (ok, shuffled) until week 30 with Will so, theoretically, I should have another 16 weeks or so of running in me. Every pregnancy is different, though, and if this race was any indication it may not go so well this time around. I'm also going to have to contend with summer heat, which is a big concern when you're running preggo. Guess I'll cross that bridge when I come to it, though.