Miscellany...

It’s Friday… whoo hoo! This has been a rather up and down week… some good stuff happened… some not-so-good stuff happened… so overall, I’m pretty happy to head into the weekend (actually, when am I not – when is anyone not – happy to head into the weekend? Duh). The weather here has been to-die-for gorgeous this week and I’m hoping it’ll continue. And I’d forgotten it was a holiday on Monday, which means no school, so that makes everything even better.

Tomorrow’s the farmer’s market in the morning, as well as a 15-mile training trek around Pigsknuckle. I realized that the Booby Walk starts exactly 5 weeks from today! Yikes! But I’m ready… I’ve completed my final registration, requested my ‘random tent-mate’, paid for my towel service (we have to shower in trucks… ick), and now I’m just trying to sort out the logistics of getting there. The opening ceremonies are Friday at 5am (I’ll be lucky if I can crawl at 5:00, never mind walk) but I need to get to the stadium no later than 4:00am to have a place to leave my car for 3 days (there are limited spaces). I was going to stay in a hotel in DC the night before, as the ‘host’ hotels are offering a discounted rate to walkers… $250 for the night. Ummm… in what universe is that a ‘discounted’ rate? I’ve stayed in DC, in nice hotels, and never, ever paid anything anywhere near that. Gougers. Anyway, I’ll sort it all out. I’m getting pretty excited about it, really.

Today marks the end of the first 2 full weeks of school. Ryan is loving it. I pick her up every day and she literally bounds out to me, all smiles, and chats non-stop all the way home about her teachers (loves them), her classes (loves some of them; doesn’t loathe the others yet); her friends (Anna, Casey, and Random Dude). It’s fantastic. We’ve spent these two weeks getting used to a new routine and sorting out a bunch of little things. She starts much earlier than last year and eats lunch later, so the whole ‘I’m starving and/or so sleepy before lunch’ thing was an issue. So we played around with various breakfasts, trying different protein and carb combinations until we came up with a meal she’s happy with. And Ryan will eat the same thing every day for months on end, so my shopping list won’t change for a while. We had to do the same with lunches. All sorted now. I also figured out we simply can’t walk to school in the mornings. We have to get up about 30 minutes earlier to do it and given that neither of us are really morning people, it just wasn’t working. I kept hitting the snooze and waking up 15 minutes later, which threw off the entire schedule. So we take our time in the morning, I drive her to school (with Sundance in the car), and then we head to the park for our walk. It works. I do walk to pick Ryan up, though, which has been terrific, because we’ve had great conversations about what goes on during her day. Oh, and she got her wonky locker sorted, too. Turns out it was indeed user-error. Go figure.

Tomorrow we’re heading out to my brother and sister-in-law’s house to hang out by the pool for the last official weekend of summer. Our fall swim practices start on Sunday and Ironwoman and I are going to get together then to talk about our GoGirlGo! program. Turns out the school won’t let us do it there, as they’re not keen on having a program run by parent volunteers. What school turns down parent volunteers?! In Ironwoman’s words, they’re ass hats. But the rec center is quite happy to have us do the program through them, so though we won’t have grant money (or the track) to play with, we do have a facility and support. We’ll manage. We’ll try to get a few businesses in the area to lend some financial assistance… it’s a great program, so it shouldn’t be too hard to get someone to commit to a tax write-off. We’ll be signing all the girls up for a 5K in December, which will mark the end of our fall program and we think we’re going to do it again in the spring, too. Oh, and I’ve decided to give that 5K in October (the one after the Booby Walk) a go. I may totally regret it… we’ll see.

Well, that’s it, my lovely bloggy buddies. I’m sure I’ve thoroughly bored you to tears (if you even made it this far). Hope you have a fabulous weekend!!! XOXO