Coming back home

Hell.  It’s a new year.  It’s also been exactly 2 months since I last wrote.  I’ve been kicking around a few creative ideas, but there has been little writing.  Not even in teeny, tiny letters.

This will be a bit of a round-up, I think.  It is so very difficult to pick back up with writing after a prolonged absence.  I just have no idea where to begin.

Austin is in the throes of a deliciously cold winter.  I love it.  I love running in it.  I love snuggling down into the nest of covers to keep warm.  My kids’ wardrobes are not exactly weathering the temperatures as well.  We have been easily lulled into the sense of non-winter, where cold weather clothes consist of pants and long sleeve shirts, perhaps a jacket if it’s cool out.  I am comforted to know I am not the only parent continually underdressing my child for this weather; I’ve seen plenty of other kids running around in shorts and t-shirts as well.  At least we can share the guilt.

We are recently returned from a long trip to California.  Long for us, that is.  Vacation is sort of a laughable, non-existent thing these days.  This was time away from work, so technically a vacation of sorts, but it was also time spent visiting family, which is great and sometimes exhausting in one long draw.  Some year, we will take a vacation that does not revolve around visiting family.  Right?

It was fab to see everyone, and it was oh so lovely to come back home. I wish our homes were a little closer together.

My son is now 3.  He is a sweet, emotional whirlwind of a child.  My daughter is 10 months.  She is starting to walk and is chatting up a storm in her sweet, babbly lingo.

I’m not one for new year resolutions.  Instead, I’ll throw some intentions out into the ring.

• Run.
• Write.
• Slow down my family life.   More cuddle, less hustle.
• See friends.
• Stop feeling trapped by circumstances.
• Keep communicating.

They all sound so simple.  The devil is in the implementation.

A break with brevity

Sparse new layout – me likey.

As you can see, I again failed to be successful in doing NaBloPoMo.  Blame Twitter, I do.  I can barely muster enough sentences to warrant an entire blog post after having pared my thoughts down to 140 characters or less.  Brevity is the new black, perhaps.  Except right here, right now because I’m way over character limit already.

How about a kid update?

Enid is 36 weeks old, or about 8.5 months, dependent on how you measure the time.  She is one very busy baby these days.  Crawling, check!  Cruising, check!  Standing solo, working on it (gasp – not sure I’m ready for a standing 9 month old).  Sleeping, sorta kinda.  Pincher grasp, check!  Teething, sweet goodness yes.  She has 5 teeth, 3 of which popped out in the last 7 days, with another visible under the gum line.  Thankfully she’s not a biter (yet).

I find myself amazed that she is so independent.  I can set her on the floor in the play room and she will play, alone!  As long as I am in sight-distance, she is happy.  For almost 18 months, I think I had Quinten stapled to my side, so this is a new experience.  It’s probably just a difference in personality, but one friends assures me that girl babes are just more independent at an earlier age.  Can this be?

Quinten is a boy wild about super heroes.  We go through tough spells here and there, mostly originating from the frenetic emotional state that is life of the almost-three.  So we’re both learning to ride the wave a bit.  The ups are fun, and the lows are trying, but necessary for him to work stuff out.  Oh, and the snuggles.  He promises to come in and snuggle with me when he wakes up in the morning.  Granted, this is starting to happen at 4:30am, thanks to our recent time change.  But still, snuggles.  Sweet, little boy snuggles are fantastic.

Despite the challenges of this age, I just can’t stop being in awe of this boy.  He loves books, he is very excited about music, and he likes to help in the kitchen.  He has finally decided that he enjoys listening to Here Come the ABCs just as much as Here Come the 123s, but it took some work.  A boy crazy about super heroes, music, books, cooking, and numbers and sometimes letters?  How could I be more proud?

I think that’s it, in a nutshell.  We have some birthdays coming up in a month.  Cue the 4th quarter time warp of holidays and birthdays that doesn’t stop until New Year’s.

Time (change) Pain

Blast you, time change. I’m dying of sleep deprivation over here. My children have no idea they gained an hour and are popping out of their beds at 4 in the AM. Well, one pops out of bed and the other screams from the crib until she is retrieved from said crib. For the love of sleep and sanity, please let this improve, stat.

Hallowent

Halloween cuties. Mr. Bee Cool, and his sister, the rough, tough little girl pirate.

With 46 Minutes to Spare

Day 2 of Nablopomo, and I’m already cutting this down to the wire. What can I say, Caprica took precedence over blogging tonight.

After the kids were asleep, I stepped out on the back patio to gaze up at this amazing, full moon and fill my ears with the sound of the nearby high school drumline rehearsing into the night.

Coming back into the house, I found myself nostalgic for marching band and remembering all those night time practices we’d have out in the Bay Area evening chill, running, running, running that drill.

And here is an obligatory baby photo. Little Miss at her first trip to Rudy’s for
breakfast tacos.

Day(s) 1

First day of November, first day of NaBloPoMo, and I just completed my first 5k race.  November is looking mighty fine, so far!

Here are a few things I learned while completing Race for the Cure: expect traffic and plan accordingly (I missed my step-off by about 7 minutes thanks to traffic); sign up for the timed race regardless of how slow I think I am (untimed just meant I got to weave in and out of a bunch of walkers that weren’t scheduled to start until 8:30 but were out there anyway); find more hilly terrain on which to train (there were several hills in this route that knocked the running umph right out of me).  All told, it went pretty damn well.  I ran about 90% of the 5k route.  Had it been a flat route, I’d have run the whole thing.

Thinking maybe the Travis County Brown Santa 5k will be next for me, though I’m not totally sold on the idea of spending my birthday morning at a very crowded race.  Maybe if someone will promise me a beer at the end of the route, I’ll feel as if I have gotten a little birthday partying in for the day.

Short and sweet.  Trying to squeeze in as many things while my kiddles are sleeping.

 

 

A new standard

2009 has not been the year for writing, at least not for me.  Sure, I’ve been a little busy becoming mother to two, but I also must admit that Twitter seems to suck up a lot of what might be written here.  It’s a great forum for sending random thoughts out into the ether, things I should probably expound upon further but promptly forget about because they’re already “out there.”

Well that was a draft from 09/17/09.  I guess it at least demonstrates a desire to write, and offers an excuse as to why I am so silent.

If you would like to follow me on Twitter, I can be found at @gnubeewonkanobi.  I keep my tweets protected because I talk a lot about my kiddles, but it’s rare I don’t allow someone to view them (unless you’re trying to sell me something or virtually sex me up, that is).  I guess I just feel uncomfortable being included in the Twitter timeline and scrutinized by people I don’t know.  And yet I have a public blog.  Hmm, paradox.

Anywhoodles.  Where to begin….

I am pushing a mountain of sleep deficit in front of me.  I used this as an excuse to not run this morning, that and how blooming humid it was out.  It’s like we woke up in the tropics.  Tomorrow I will run, and then chill out until Sunday, Sunday, Sunday, which is Race for the Cure day and I’m going to run, run, run all 5k of it.

I’m at the point in the couch-to-5k program where it’s all running save for warm up/cool down.  It’s exciting.  I run for 25 minutes straight.  And I even have a little oomph left over afterward, which I take to mean that I might even eke out 30-35 minutes if I made certain to pace myself.  Plagued by childhood asthma and terrible allergies, I never was much on outdoor physical activity.  It was all books, band, and boys for me.

It’s a new world to me, one wherein my body is not the enemy but a source of strength and wonder.  And I realize it’s a world I might never have discovered were it not for having had 2 children.  The immense work involved with nurturing and sheltering that developing babe, sharing a body with him or her, and the carnival-like experience of birthing that babe out of one’s body and the act of going from being one to being two really changed how I think about what I can and can’t do.  Both of those births have become my new ultimate experiences, the standard by which I measure all else I can do physically.

So my general plan is to complete Race for the Cure, run a couple more 5ks and try to start training for a 10k when I hit the 6 month running mark (April 2010).  And then I’m going to craft a plan to take over the world, one diaper at a time.

Eternal return

Over a month of silence.  Let’s see if we can dust the cobwebs off this thing.

I never intend to let things get away from me like that, but there are certain things said about intentions that probably aren’t worth repeating because it’s all be said before.  And someone will surely say it again.

It’s bleak in my head today.  As a color, I think grey is mighty fine.  As a mood, it doesn’t really yield me much.

I listened to part of a Radiolab podcast about death yesterday, and this grey mood probably started there.  Someday I’ll actually finish listening to that podcast, considering it’s been on my iPod for months now.  I’ve gotten about half-way through it 5 times now, but always wind up turning it off.  It’s just hard to listen to, and hard to think about, and when I think about it in this frame of mind, it all just seems sort of pointless.  It’s days like this, thought patterns like this that wear me down.  This life, this job, this breakfast, this routine.  All is the same.   There is but one path despite our allusions of choice and free-will.

Thought crisis of the moment, courtesy of Schopenhauer, and Nietzsche, and Jung, and Peter Pan, and the re-imagined Battle Star Galactica (and many others): All this has happened before, and it will happen again.

So there is the rub: how do we bring meaning to a life that is seemingly meaningless.

On a brighter note, I’m trying to convince myself that doing NaBloPoMo in November is a good thing.  If I write out enough of the bad stuff, the good stuff might actually see the light of day, right?

 

Do run, run

My knees are back in working order, thanks be.  The week off allowed me enough time to recover and I am no longer hobbling around like I’m 40 weeks pregnant.

C25K is still going well.  The first day back after a week-long hiatus was tough in and of itself, but was made more difficult by pushing a stroller full of preschooler in front of me while trying to keep focused on breathing and running.  I’m very much not to the level where I can run and talk at the same time without feeling out of breath, much to the disappointment of my sweet, chatty preschooler.  It was the first time I had to walk through parts of my running interval.  Fail, fail, fail.

Today was infinitely better.  It was bordering on crisp outside.  No walking when I should’ve been running.  Better focus.  No stroller pushing.  Still need to get new shoes, we’ll see if I ever manage to get some time away during Rogue’s business hours so I can have gait-analysis done and buy shoes that will keep me properly aligned.

One of the most important elements of this work out is having the proper music on my mobile music-playing device.  I’ve been utilizing iTunes’ Genius Bar to create playlists for this purpose.  I’m not really a playlist sort of woman – there is something very satisfying about listening to an album from beginning to end.  Of course, that sort of listening doesn’t lend itself to a short, 30 minute workout.  And the Genius Bar does all the work for me, I need only to pick the first track.  Easy, peasy.

One of the playlists is based on Tribe Called Quest, and is mostly TCQ, Beastie Boys, Ludacris, Blackalicious, Jay-Z, and Outkast.  And I am finding it to be the PERFECT running mix.  Engaging enough for me to listen to, upbeat enough to keep me up and moving, and often funky enough that I can barely avoid dance-walking during the walk interval.  Good stuff, and perhaps I provide a little comic relief for my neighbors.  I had really terrible results with my jazz/fusion playlist, unfortunately.  It’s all music I hold near and dear, but it’s also music that makes me ponder chord changes, improvisation, modes, and does a lot to distract me from the breathing and running aspect of C25K.

I might caution to say the music will make or break a workout for me.  After all those years spent in marching band, I feel most comfortable running/walking to a tune where each footfall occurs on beat with the music.  No need to worry about pacing when I can run footfall to footfall and beat to beat with the perfect song.  Heck, I even find myself switching up steps and pace to walk on beat with music I hear at the grocery store.  Band geek, extraordinaire at your service.

6 weeks and 4 days until Race for the Cure.  I plan to be as ready as possible.

Race for the Cure (no Robert Smith contained herein)

I’m purposely trying to avoid reading anything about our broken health care system today.  We’ll see how far I get before I heed the siren song of another Facebook post decrying attempts to fix the system as beginning our descent into communism.  Man, that stuff just weighs so heavily on my heart and soul.

So on to some cool news.  I started the Couch to 5k training program a couple weeks ago.  You can check it out here.  I really started it on a whim.  Despite best intentions of kissing the kids and the husband goodbye and heading upstairs to shower, I instead donned my sports bra, got dressed, threw on my running shoes and started this new adventure.  All of which is to say it’s probably for the best I didn’t put much thought into the decision.  With enough notice, I can talk myself out of anything.

Training has been going well so far, save for some annoying knee issues.  Thanks to a lot of feedback and various suggestions from my Austin Mama friends, I now have several fixes that will hopefully have me back to training next week.  One of the suggestions was to purchase new running shoes.  As a shoe lover, I am tickled at this prospect.

Truth be told, I really didn’t have an end goal when starting the training program, other than finding a way to move, move, move this body, and carve some time out for myself that didn’t involve cleaning up after everyone, wiping bottoms, changing diapers, or trying to figure out what everyone else (besides me) needs.

But now, now I have a goal (hopefully the first among many)!  I am registered to run in the Susan G. Komen Race for the Cure 5k happening in Austin on November 1, 2009.  If you would like to support me in this cause, please go here.