Christmas Card 2012

I tried and tried and tried to get just one family picture. Finally I gave up. So this is it for this year, just a card. Hopefully in the spring we can get some real family pictures done. I hope you all had a wonderful Christmas!

Puffy Coat

Ezra got a new puffy coat for playing in the snow, and Ava said, "It's his life jacket coat!" Ha! It is orange...

In other funny quotes, as I was bathing her last night and soaping her up, Ava said, "You can stick your hands in my bum cuz you were eating pizza." I have no idea what that means, but we did have pizza for dinner.

Vote Wisely

Mouse in the House

We have a big mouse problem in our pantry and his name is Ezra.

He likes to bite holes in bags of food. At the grocery store I have to put my produce out of reach because he will grab it and chew through the bags and gnaw on the food (green onions, limes, anything). The good news is his last 4 teeth have broken through the gums now, so hopefully he will get a break from teething for a while.

Rough and Tumble

That's how he rolls. And trips. And stumbles. And falls.
Its seems like when Ezra gets a head wound, he gets a bunch all at once. This week this is what he has accomplished.

And just so you know, I've moved the baby gate to the bottom of the basement stairs to keep him out of the basement, so now he won't be shaking the gate violently until he loosens it and falls down the stairs. He can go down stairs just fine.
I almost took him to get stitches for that one on the right. It's healing pretty well though, so I'm glad I didn't. It would have been unnecessary torture. He won't keep a bandaid on for more than an hour, so I had to put some "liquid bandaid" superglue type stuff on it and that seems to be working.
Its amazing any of us survive toddlerhood. I was no more than 5 feet away from him when each of these injuries occurred. I think I need to just bubble wrap his head for the next year or so.

Tough Mudder

Last weekend Ryan did the Tough Mudder. It's a 12 mile run with crazy obstacles. Crazy like stupid crazy. Crazy like running through dangling electrical wires while you are wet and muddy and getting 10,000 volts running through you and almost passing out. And swimming under barrels in ice filled pools of water. I can't believe any events company would even take on such a liability. And I can't believe any living soul would ever have a desire to repeat such an experience. You should check out their website, it looks like marine training for torture survival.

Yes, that's ICE they are pouring into the pool. In October. Not July.

Team Gretel & Pedal

A few weekends ago I did a bike race called Lotoja (stands for Logan to Jackson). Knowing that I myself could not ride 206 miles in under 12 hours without much more training time, I joined up with 4 of my friends to ride as a relay team. It was a really fun girls weekend and a fun ride, though marred in the end by tragedy.
Here is our old 200,000 mile truck which carried 5 bikes for us through the weekend. That was pretty awesome.

The morning was quite chilly. Summer was our first rider, all geared up!

 From left to right: Heather, Ashley, Tiffany, Me, Summer.

I rode leg 2, which was 47 miles with one big long climb. Thank goodness Ashley rode leg 3 (46 miles with 2 BIG steep climbs) and dominated. Seriously, she dominated. She passed everyone. When she came in to switch riders we were unprepared because she was 30 minutes earlier than our earliest "best case scenario" estimate! Heather rode leg 4 and Tiff rode leg 5.

Tiff getting ready to head out, waiting for Heather to come in. Ashley made this great logo so we could have team t-shirts and a big vinyl sticker on the back window of our truck.

And Heather coming in, putting the timing chip on Tiff, and Tiff about to head out.

 

We were all really happy with our times and had a lot of fun!
Ryan also did the race (the whole thing) with some friends and got his best time yet: 9 hrs 44 min. I think.

Excess details:
The tragedy I referred two in the beginning was a death, first one in 30 years of this race. Leg 5 had a lot of debris and road construction and mess on the road. About 15 miles from the finish line an experienced rider either hit-or swerved to miss-a pothole and went over the undersized guardrail over the bridge. Sadly, he did not survive. Really devastating. After that accident as everyone was trying to help, a well-intentioned person put a construction barrel over that pothole, right in the middle of the biking lane. When you are riding in a line of bikers, drafting, you can't see the road ahead. Only the biker in front of you. There are hand signals that are used to warn those behind you of obstacles, gravel, etc. Unfortunately after riding almost 200 miles people are very tired and don't always signal or react in time to signal the rider behind them. So when my last teammate came to this section, she wasn't warned of the barrel and barely clipped it and crashed. Fortunately the rider next to her was a doctor, but she was still out for several minutes. Thank goodness for helmets though. She was taken to the hospital and in the end broke nothing but got pretty severe concussion. She's a trooper though and has been really great and positive through the whole ordeal that followed.