January 2k15

at this point in Prim's life, most of the pictures i took of her were her looking cute in her outfit of the day since that's pretty much all she could do.

i got this little outfit out just in time! katie got it for easter thinking i'd have a little baby like hers. nope! her happy easter (with a bunny on the bum!) fit three months early.

i got two gender neutral shirts at my baby shower that said things like 'just arrived'. a couple weeks before she was born, i returned them and got a different gender neutral shirt and this very girly shirt.

little booties from her great grandma woodbury! she wore those all the time.

dressed up for church.

sitting out back with the puppies. it is so beautiful here.

her two month check up!!!! she is such a little dolly.

10 pounds 6 ounces, 95th percentile for height and 25th for weight!

she started smiling a lot around this time and i loved it so much.

my watch from jon when he graduated!!!!! it was lost for 5 months and jon thought it was gone for good but i kept praying it was around here somewhere. we were cleaning behind our bed and he found it on a box behind the bed. i am so happy!

can you even?? she is simply pleasant.

lizzie and i decided to train for a 5k together. we worked out together in different states when i lived in california and it actually helped to have a motivator. this was day one of my couch to 5k and it was hard and felt amazing!!!! i am so proud of my body. i kept thinking "if my doctors could see me now."

jon and i are part of a museum club and they were having a picasso event a night jon was at school so we decided to go. everyone there complimented me on how well behaved Prim was the entire night. the picasso pieces were enormous tapestries paid for by Rockefeller which don't sound interesting but actually really were. they filled up the wall floor to ceiling and prim would just stare at all the colors. 

hehe i always thought she looked like baby grinch when she would cry. once we started feeding her formula, she only cried when we would burp her halfway between her bottles. rarely ever any other time.

jegggggins

we went on lots of walks together for fresh air and exercise. she looked particularly lovely this day in her little summer outfit.

Primmy's little area of of our room (while packing for dallas):

we bought her furniture at ikea a couple months before she was born and had so much fun putting it together! the pictures- top left: a frame i bought before she was born, middle top: another frame i bought before she was born knowing i wanted to frame her little feet. silver right: from jon's aunt karma and grandma (picture every month of her first year). two left pictures: funny little framed pictures that were in our bedroom growing up. middle: painting from nana (jon's mom) to primmy for christmas. middle right: a picture of my mom, who prim was named after (teresa). left bottom: painting amanda made me for christmas. it said "all is well." because my granny used to say that to us all the time. every time she wrote me a letter or ended the conversation on the phone she would say "and i hope all is well with you guys.." bottom middle: from kim bird! I am a child of God. Bottom right: a cross stitch kathy made for Prim with her blessing date on it! everything is so special to us.

the top of her wardrobe is covered with stuffed animals that people sent us and gifted prim. the chevron painting is from kaitlyn that was at my baby shower. the wood blocks are another gift from kim. the gold picture is one i bought right before she was born. a little girly, i'd say. ;)
pink piggy from lyndsi and silver from aunt karma and grandma. teddy from brittany that smells like a baby nursery!

this is the chalkboard mal made prim. it hangs above the dresser from my gran's house. and i put the picture of jesus there so that she could see him every day.

and to end, are you serious? here we are all ready for our 5 hour drive to dallas. i can't believe how beautiful she is.

JW Marriott San Antonio Hill Country/Illuminations HALF!

We had our second 1/2 marathon on Saturday!!! we have been slacking in our training since the last one, not running more than 6 miles at a time since. so we were kind of nervous…we were really excited though because the half was being held at the local and very new JW Marriott! they offered us an awesome rate for the night, so we splurged and reserved a room the night of the race.

 over the course of our 24 hour stay, i probably took four baths. heavenly.

 teehee.

 this was the view from our room. isn't is beautiful to just see horizon? it always blows me away how truly big the texas sky is, it just goes onnn and onnn….

 we checked in at about 2pm on saturday. the resort is literally a 5 minute drive from our house and is visible from our neighborhood. (it sits up on a hill and its HUGE)

 we found a BOM in the nightstand with a bible!!!!

 we toured the hotel lobby, picked up our race packets and drank our complimentary hot chocolate. i didn't finish mine, but jon did haha, not the best idea pre-race. jon was stressing me out way bad because he started getting ready like an hour before the race started and i just wanted to lounge and not let my nerves get the best of me. we were mostly nervous because it was 30 degrees outside. maybe that wouldn't sound that bad if the weather had been gradually decreasing over the weeks, but no. it had been 84 degrees the week before. it was quite a severe drop in temperature….

 i thought i was really prepared with my running leggings and sweats on bottom, compression shirt, hoodie and windbreaker on top with a beanie. once i started my run i realized that yeah, i was hot, and also the only one wearing sweats on top and bottom and a non-running beanie. amateur. 

 we stretched inside right before the race started. see those hoards of people? we could all see our breath. it didn't really matter if you were inside or outside, it was so cold!!!

(also look at my socks. while i was stretching i kept getting a glimpse of them and thinking i was really tan. they're just socks. ha.)

the race was awesome!!!!!!! (it was 27 degrees when we finished) i was way bummed out when i started because i realized my nike+ wasn't working and wasn't going to help me during my 13 miles. i left without jon, thinking i'd see him in a few minutes when he passed me. i turned on my music and the stopwatch on my phone (lammeee) and ran for about 3 minutes before jon caught up to me. i turned off my music and we talked for a few minutes. i kept telling him he could go on without me, but he decided to stay and run with me. wow, i can't tell you how great that was for me! running is definitely a mind game and when i was by myself on the last half, my loneliness got the best of me and i struggled the whole race. this time, with jon talking and laughing with me, we were just going out for a casual run together! it made the whole race so much fun. it was pitch black, the trail only illuminated by tiny LED lights. almost the entire run was through the golf course and i kept thinking about how much my dad would love to golf there. the trails were very windy, so when we'd turn around at a bend, you'd look back and see hundreds of little lights running along the trail behind you. it was so pretty. we nearly froze, i remember being so so cold at once point and jon, who is never cold, would casually put his bandana up over his face haha. because of jon, i finished 20 minutes earlier than my last half at 2:26.45!!!!!! i still can't believe it and keep trying to figure out how that time could be wrong, but it isn't. the temperature actually helped me a lot, my body really didn't hurt that much. because it was a night run, i had time to eat and hydrate all day long which was another enormous improvement from the rock'n'roll when i was starving to death! jon and i laughed a lot during the race and it was really fun to hold hands and cross the finish line, he is the best. another great part about the race was….our family came to see us! john, kathy, and melissa (jon's step sister who just moved in with us! with her dog!) came to see us cross the finish line. we finished way earlier than expected and parking was horrible so they didn't see the real thing, but they were there and that's all that matters. we got to show them our room and share our race winning food with them. after they left, we took hot baths/showers and ate until we fell asleep. then we woke up and immediately started eating again. 

(if i told you i started eating potato chips first thing in the morning, would you be upset?)

 

the people at the marriott were all so professional and sweet, it was really great. right before we left for the race, we called the front desk and asked them to turn our bed down while we were running. so when we got back, our bed was prepared for us to fall into it and eat our tiny chocolates they left us! they also gave us complimentary late checkout (1pm) so that we could rest up after the race. that meant we could hot tub when we woke up!

texas is the best, its so fun to live here and love texas like everyone else does.

i thought the picture of the longhorn in our room and the cowhide ottoman was pretty texassy, but i think the enormous scale of the hotel overall was the most texassy of all. i'm not sure these pictures accurately show that, but the ceilings were so high and the light fixtures were gigantic. while jon walked out to the car to bring it around, i sat at the top of these stairs and just looked at the fixtures. i think they were 10 feet from top to bottom.

all in all, it was a fun and exciting weekend! 

oh, i forgot to mention this:

we booked the room at a rate of $119 for the night (before taxes and all that jazz). the night before we checked in, we called to get the total for the stay. $189!!! we seriously contemplated not going because it was much more than we were expecting. we have been so excited about staying there and knew it would be very convenient after the cold race to just go up to our room and warm up, so we went for it. we have been saving our change since we got married (along with my tips from when i worked at stouts). we filled up our little tube so we cashed it all in and got $139 out of it!! we planned on paying that with cash and the rest of the stay on our card. 

when the guy checked us in and told us the price, our jaws dropped. he said "the total for the room will be $138.93." we did not ask any questions and let him keep his 7 cents!!!! isn't that amazing?? we don't know what happened, but we are very grateful!

san antonio rock 'n' roll half marathon

 we ran our first half marathon today!!! yesterday we went to the expo center and shopped 'til we nearly dropped/until i had to go to work.

 i impulse purchased these tattoos that help you monitor your pace and i loveeddddd mine even though i continued to be off another minute each passing mile, haha. my expectations for my time were a teeeeeny bit unrealistic. jon put his on upside down and i got a good laugh but he definitely didn't. it actually didn't matter because we tried going to bed last night and jon said "it feels like there are 1,000 ants on my tattoo". turns out he was having an allergic reaction!:

we signed up for the race in april and started training pretty seriously in july. the first few months of training, we ran first thing in the morning. we signed up for a second half marathon on dec. 7th that is a night run so we decided that we should probably try to run in the afternoons and that ended up working better for our schedule anyway. i think that hurt me during the half today. i have been so used to eating and hydrating all day before the run that while i was running today i was soooo thirsty and starving even though i thought i had planned pretty well the days leading up to it.

jon and i parted ways about .01 miles into the race and it started out okay for me even though i knew i had picked the wrong tattoo very early on.

my first layer of KT tape wore off at mile 2 and my right leg KT tape wore off at mile 6. When i got halfway, i was already pep-talking myself. i couldn't believe how much more difficult this was compared to our 9, 10, and 11 mile runs that we did at home in the afternoon. i was soooo thirsty but the more i drank, the weirder it felt on my stomach. luckily i packed four power bar energy blasts (with no caffeine) and they helped a lot. the longest i've ever run is 11 miles so when i passed that mile marker i was pretty proud of myself! i was definitely counting down the minutes and miles at this point and was really trying not to walk. at 12 miles i started taking walking breaks. my breaths were so shallow that i got a painful side ache and starting walking soon before the finish line. an angel sent straight from heaven pushed on my shoulder and said "c'mon baby girl." i groaned but started running and crossed the finish line at a run. i don't think i could have pushed myself, she's just what i needed and i made sure to thank her afterwards.

jon was waiting for me at the finish line looking wayyyy better than i felt! he finished in 2:22! I am so proud of him! my legs and feet actually held up pretty well. my biggest problem was my lower back (which started hurting pretty bad at mile 11) and my hunger/thirst. i couldn't stand up for very long after i finished and had to lay down for quite awhile before i got the courage to make the trek to the shuttles to take us 15 minutes back to the car and then drive 35 minutes home, ughhh. the drive home was unpleasant and i truly thought i was going to throw up. i felt better as soon as i showered and took a bath. i've been a bit queazy today but i'm not as sore as i expected (tomorrow should be fun).

i finished in 2:46 and am pretty proud! we have another half in three weeks and we are both excited and not excited. my goal is to finish that one in 2:45 and jon's goal is 2:20. the best part about our upcoming race is that it is at the brand new JW Marriott just up the street from us. they're nightly rates are usually $250 and up, but they offered us a ridiculous deal the night of the race! it is a night run through their property decorated with christmas lights and after the race we can go straight up into our luxury hotel room. 

we are so proud of ourselves for finishing today! it took a lotttt of time and dedication to get us to this point that we never thought we would be at. it was awesome to be among 25,000 people who were all making themselves proud and succeeding in such a difficult thing (especially the full marathoners). 

race for the cure.

i ran a 5k with panera bread.

i wonder if i've mentioned that i started working at panera bread on here? well, i did. about two months ago. 

here is the whole panera group:

(i didn't know that i looked as awkward as i felt while this was being taken)

and here are the people from our cafe who ran the 5k. my friend from church got me the job. she is standing behind me in the sun glasses. 

the race started out pretty rough. i wasn't really planning on beating my personal 5k record of 29 minutes. i haven't been running as consistently as i would like, only once or twice a week for the past month or so. but i was hoping to get under 35 minutes, i thought that was reasonable. we were busy taking photos, so i started the race late. looking back, i wish i wouldn't have done that. i left the starting line at about 8:10. that means for ten minutes, hundreds of people had already started walking the race. for the first mile, i was running, walking, running, walking because it was so crowded and almost everyone was walking. it was frustrating, but i am not mad at the people who were walking. i saw so many different types of people there, it was really touching. there were lots of old ladies! at the registration booth you could pick up a piece of paper and write who you were running the race for. i found myself tearing up a few times while reading what people wrote and had pinned to their backs. one older lady was running really slow in front of me and when i got close, her paper said "me. x2" meaning she'd survived breast cancer twice, and was now running in a race. it was amazing.

the 5k was at balboa park, one of our favorite places in san diego. about halfway through the race, i noticed that we were heading toward the freeway entrance. i was in disbelief when i found myself running onto the entrance!

 isn't this crazy! i've never run on a freeway before, ever!
why would i have??

 it smelled surprisingly good down there. the air was moist, and it smelled like a forest. i had to stop and take photos, it was too beautiful not to. 

this is me and jon's bridge, at least that's what we say. this is the prettiest bridge in all of san diego. if you ever get a chance, drive down the 163 freeway at dusk in the springtime. you will not be disappointed.  it was so awesome to be able to walk right under this! it may have been a once in a lifetime opportunity for me. i wished jon was there with me, the bridge was totally up close and personal. :)

 the last mile was absolute torture. while i was running and approaching the freeway exit i thought to myself "we are pretty far down here. that can only mean one thing..." and i was right. it was uphill for at least a mile. i'm not sure this picture accurately depicts how hard it was. you can see on the right the masses running along the freeway, and then toward the left you see a little bit of the top of the hill underneath the while building. so hard! 

i made it in 34 minutes! pretty good for start/stopping in the beginning and stopping for photos of the scenery. i was in a really good mood after the race. i was really touched by all of the women and some men running for their friends, family, and themselves who had died of breast cancer or are survivors of it. i ran it in salt lake back in 2009 with spencer and my brother in law, sam. i need to remember to do this again because it was a really good feeling being around such positive people.