Races

So this post is to give an idea of what our family does for exercise and really as a hobby these days. Last June Pete asked Soren if she would like to try a kids triathlon and she said yes. It was such a great event and she had so much fun that she ended up doing many more over the summer, even travelling to Shreveport and Austin to compete. In the kid's races, every finisher is a winner and they give them all medals, but they are also chip timed events. You wear a chip on your ankle and it times each leg of the race as well as your overall time and your transition time. Going by these times, Soren has been in the top three of every race she has entered. She is quite talented. At the end of the summer, Pete decided that she was ready for a racing bike and bought her a trek. The cutest thing I have ever seen! It has improved her bike time a lot. It is only May 30th and she has already done 3 triathlons this season and has her 4th this coming weekend. She will go to triathlon camp at the end of June and has at least 2 races each month.

Along with the triathlons, Soren has run many 5k races. She and Pete ran the Dad Fest 5k as a team last Father's day and took 1st place. Soren has done many more on her own including the Cowtown 5k in which she was 3rd out of 250 girls her age.

She is also doing swim team this summer to polish up on her strokes. She is very athletic like her dad and it is so much fun to watch her compete.

After seeing how much fun Soren had in her first triathlon, Pete and I got interested. I had been jogging for about 3 months to try to get in shape and made a goal to run a 5k sometime that summer. Pete is always in shape and was working with a guy who was a long time biker, so he bought a racing bike right away and got started training. We joined the YMCA so we could practice swimming (which was SO much harder than I thought it would be!). By July I had a new racing bike and on our 11th anniversary in August, Pete and I went down to Blanco State Park and did our first triathlon. It was a mini sprint 300 meter swim, 10 mile bike and 2 mile run which was so perfect for a first race. We shocked ourselves and walked away with medals. Pete was 1st in his age group and 4th overall out of 232 racers. I was 2nd in my age group and 31st overall. It was such a great experience and I have been hooked on the sport ever since then.

This summer we have some lofty goals. Pete is training to complete an iron man distance triathlon. That will be 2.5 mile swim, 112 mile bike, and then a marathon 26.2 mile run. That is so crazy to me. There are so many people that can do these races that the actual Iron Man races fill up a full year before the race, so Pete found an iron man distance in Oklahoma City in September and that is his goal. He ran the Cowtown marathon in March, and then started the months long training for the iron man. I am going to try to complete a half iron man distance in August. It will be 1.2 mile swim, 56 mile bike and a 13 mile run. I am very excited and my goal is to cross the finish line before they shut down the course. They allow 8 hours and if you are not off the course by then you are listed as DNF (did not finish). If all goes well with that race then I would like to train for the Whiterock marathon in December. I have always thought that to run a marathon would be an amazing feat, and if I can do an 8 hour race I think I can run one. We will see in August if I keep that as a goal or not!

We are enjoying this sport so much. We all have our training guides and work around each other's schedules to fit it all in. It is great to have a hobby that we can all do together. Pete even bought a second bike that he could pull Reese behind in a trailer until she is big enough for the trail-a-bike. Hopefully we are in for a great season of racing.

Mouse Trouble

To back up a little, Soren and her friend Katy wanted a little white feeder mouse for a pet. Katy's mom said absolutely no but we have had one before and it was not bad, so just after Christmas I took them to the pet store and they each picked out a little GIRL mouse to live together at our house. When Soren was 2 we accidentally came home with a boy and a girl and three weeks later we had 14 mice instead of just 2. Soren has another friend, Rachel, who is in Mrs. Lassater's class. Mrs. Lassater was the science teacher last year and when she became a 2nd grade teacher she took the python, Jessica, with her to be the class pet. Jessica eats these little feeder mice. Rachel has two boy mice. Soren and Rachel get this fabulous idea to "mate" their mice and feed the babies to Jessica. Disturbing. Well, the thought of seeing the whole process of baby mice sounded kind of cool, so Rachel's mom and I conceded and we each switched a mouse so that we had a boy and a girl and Rachel had a boy and a girl. Soren and Katy were so funny when we came home with the new boy. They insisted on a wedding ceremony before the two were allowed to live in the same cage. On Easter Sunday I could hear some squeaking so I peeked in the cage (we had it covered because the mom does better with privacy) and we had some babies! They were about the size of a thumbnail and there were 15 of them. We left the cage covered for about 5 days. That same day Rachel calls and informs us that her mouse was also having babies but that she was killing them all by biting off their heads. This is actually quite normal for a first litter and they also did not cover the cage. We had so much fun watching the babies grow.

By the time they were 3 weeks old they were almost as big as the mom. Each day we would have to count and see how many babies were still alive because the mom will eat one if it is weak or sick. The really strange thing is that there is absolutely no remains of the missing baby. 9 of them survived to adulthood. Over the three weeks, not surprisingly, Soren and Katy got way too attached to the babies to think about feeding them to Jessica, but they also knew they could not keep them. They made up fliers and passed them out at school. Do you want a mouse? Check yes or No. Please return to Soren on the playground. They had an overwhelming response and came home to me with all of these yeses. I then asked if any of them had asked their parents. Not one of them got the green light from mom and dad.

Soren and Katy decided the best thing to do was to set them free in the field across the street under a large stone. They kept 3 baby girls and let all of the other mice go, even the mom. The other mom died, sadly, some time after child birth. So then we had three mice and the cage was in the garage, but it was getting quite hot so I suggested that we put in on the table on the back porch. It has been out there for a couple of weeks now. This weekend with the rain and cool temperatures I have had the windows open and was woken up at 5 am by a loud crash from the back porch. I knew immediately that it was the cage. I looked out the window and sure enough it was shattered all over the ground. A cat was messing with it and knocked it off of the table. I was so tired, so I went back to bed thinking the mice were going to be too hard to catch outside and we would just get some more. When Pete and I got up later we went out to clean up and two of the mice were still in their little tube. So we put the cage back together and now we are back to having two little girl mice. It has been an adventure.

Here we go

I decided to go against my better judgement and start a blog. Mainly for my kids. Everyday I email stories out to my family of the funny things Soren and Reese are up to. My dad always tells me that I need to be writing them down and so I am going to do it this way. This can be an addition to the scrapbooks that I slave over.

There is too much to go back and retell, so I will start with a clean slate. It is May 25, 2007 and we are less than a week away from Soren's last day of 2nd grade. I am SO excited for summer. Soren is signed up for swim team and we are all signed up for numerous races over the coming months. Soren has done 3 triathlons in the last month and I have done 1. We are loving the sport and train daily.

We shall see how well I keep this up. Hopefully it will turn into a journal of great stories for my kids to enjoy in the years to come.