Owen, our photographer

Owen has been taking a lot of pictures lately. Here is installment one of Owen's photos. Coming soon will be his race photos - they are stellar!
Don't tell him, but he's getting a kids' digital camera for Christmas. I'm so excited to give it to him!!!

Birthday Boys

The big boys turned FIVE this weekend. I can't believe it. I must post the requisite newborn photo comparison shot, right!?

Need to get it together!!!

After the race, I ate a lot. So I skipped my weigh-ins here and there. So now I am 2 weeks out and I finally went to ww last wednesday....and gained 2.8! Sheesh! So I of course did what any sensible loser would do and ate whatever I wanted during Thanksgiving and the days after, drank a lot of alcohol, and didn't really exercise! Woo! Way to go, me! :)

One thing I did do well was a Turkey Trot on the morning of Thanksgiving, though! Todd and I ran the Lansdowne Turkey Trot 5K and I beat 30 minutes. I was excited - 29:12 is the fastest I've ever run a 5K. Yay, me!

So now it's time to refocus and not get sucked into the "I'll start over after the new year" trap of the holidays. I CAN lose weight over the holidays! It's GO TIME.

And here's a cute picture of Charlotte reading a book to one of her new babies from Mamere. :)

Race pictures

You can go here to check out race pictures of me.

You can go here to check out race pictures of Todd.

My first half marathon story!

Me, afterwards.

It was a great race! :) Overall very friendly cheerleaders and volunteers, police officers cheering us on, funny signs and lots of nice scenery. The trees were gorgeous and the race course was lovely.

I met my friend A at the library steps at 7:20 to get down to the starting line. We were standing in our corral wondering how on earth we would ever find our friend K when we turned around and there she was! Yay! The three of us ran together for the whole race and I couldn't be happier that we ran together. We were a great team. :)

The first few miles were chilly but when the sun hit us it was nice and warm. I "donated" a shirt, hat, and gloves to the street (the race was picking up all the discarded clothing and donating it to a homeless shelter). The first hill was a doozie, but we did it just fine. People were already looking exhausted at mile 2 but we just passed 'em on by.

The middle of the race was fine - we went through a nice park. There weren't any cheerleaders through the park, which made it more just like a regular jog (with a lot of people), and that was pretty cool. I imagine if I had been running by myself it would have been a nice respite and time to think and reflect on LIFE and training that got me there. Lucky for my therapist, I had 2 lovely ladies to chat with the whole time and we took full advantage of this time by gossiping about co-workers, lamenting our public education system, and chatting about relationships. It was awesome.

When we got to mile 10 we were super excited because we knew we only had a 5K left. We told each other that we had done a 5K before and it was no big deal. :) The last 3.1 were great - lots of support on the roads, and we just booked it in with no problems. (Well, one minor problem....I thought my toe was falling off....) (It didn't fall off). There were beer stations along the way, some junk food stations, a station that was giving away shots of some liquor, and some great signs near the finish. My favorites were "Worst Parade Ever" and "You will feel so great after you get drunk on one beer tonight!"

The finish was a steep downhill and I felt like my legs were going on their own! We crossed the finish line with our hands held high! Here is my official time, which I am excited about - I wanted to beat 2:30! Yay, us! We should be getting a few pictures from friends soon and I will post them. :)

15176 JANE WALDROP 32 F  2:25:07

How I blog if I am sitting at my desk with no blogger access...

Aloha 4-5

Day 4 was kind of a lazy day - we spent the morning eating breakfast with this little guy at a cafe then wandered through the ironman exhibits. We got some new shoes (thanks Gaga and Papa!) and some samples of other goodies. We went to the grocery store and then got Kim and Rob at the airport. We had a nice Italian dinner together.

The next day was Ironman. Here are some shots I took. None of them are of Papa, you can go over to Kim's blog to see some awesome pics of the trip and the race.

 

Aloha 3

Day 3 in Kona, Todd, Debbie and I headed out on an adventure. We drove to the volcano! On the way, we stopped at The Coffee Shack - check out the view! We thought this restaurant was so cute, we went back and ate there a few days later with Kim and Rob. (Gecko pictures to come!)

 

After grabbing a coffee, we headed south to the Black Sand beach. Apparently, there are turtles aplenty there, crawling up your legs, giving you kisses, letting you ride them, etc.....but we didn't see any. But it was still lovely. 

 We arrived at the volcano after stopping for lunch in Volcano at a cute little wood-fired oven place. Todd had a pizza, Debbie had a chicken sandwich, and I had a prociutto and mozzarella sandwich. YUM. Here is a picture of the volcano!

This is a picture of one of the paths we walked down. We had a good hike while we were there:

Here I am, about to skype the kids from the volcano (awesome!)

After the volcano close-up, we drove down to the coast to see where the lava had gone into the ocean and over the road. It was pretty cool. There was a lava bridge-type thing, and a Japanese couple that wanted Todd to talk "full body" pictures of them.  

On the way back up the mountain, we stopped at the lava tube, which was a cool....um....lava tube.

That night, we ate at a great place where I had my best meal of the week! It was a portabello mushroom with couscous and feta and asparagus. YUM to the O.

Aloha 2.2

The rest of our second day was spent visiting the Puako Petroglyph park. A very interesting place. We parked in a parking lot by one of the resorts and hiked through a weird little forest that we started calling the "Enchanted Forest." We saw about 20-30 petroglyphs, hiked until we thought we might be done, and then want back to the car. When we got there, we read in the book that there were 3,000 petroglyphs on the site. Oops, we missed a few!

 

Aloha Day 2.1

We started our day on Tuesday with a walk downtown and a jog back to the condo, stopping at Lava Java's for a cinamon bun. After showering, etc. we set out to Hawi, in the northern part of the island. Once there, we ate at Bamboo Restaurant. It was very yummy. We had potstickers (which I ate and had peanuts in it, and even though I freaked out a lot, I didn't go into anaphalaxis, so maybe I'm not allergic to peanuts!?) and then fish sandwiches and fish quesadillas. Yummy.

 After lunch, we wandered through the local shops, posed by an alien, and then drove up to Pololu.

Here there was a long hike down the mountain to a black sand beach. Todd and I went about halfway down to get a better picture of the beach. It was a tough hike back up, but very pretty! 

 After our hike, we did a drive-by shooting of the King Kamehameha statue. It was much smaller than I anticipated:

Kona, day 1

We arrived in Kona on Monday late afternoon. The airport on the Big Island is outdoors, which was cool. Here is a photo from the outside of the airport:

The next few pictures are of the view from our lanai. We stayed a little south of the main downtown of Kailua-Kona. When we arrived, we dropped our stuff off and then headed to the grocery store. I may or may not have had a confrontation with the checkout girl, hard to say what really happened with my lack of sleep. We grabbed some goodies to eat for dinner and then hit the sheets. We were tired.  

Kids and adults would surf outside of our window daily, all day long from sunrise to sunset. 
A lot of the island is made up of black lava rock, and people will often take the white stones from the beach and spell out words on the rocks. No idea what this meant, but it was outside our window the whole week: