My goodness have my monkies been silly lately! They have been up to all sort of silliness!
Lillian tried to wear all her hats at once.
They snatched my baking ingredients while “helping” me to bake scones.
They ate butter off of butter knives.
They ate tomatoes as if they were apples.
They chased our lovebird around the house!
With the lovely increase in spring time weather around here my legs have been getting itchy for some running. On Monday I managed to drag my sorry butt out of bed and ran my first pre-6am 5km run and then on Tuesday I booked it across town to 6:30am yoga! So after two days of doing crazy am workouts, I gave Steve the choice of whether he’d want me to run a third day in a row or if he’d like a morning off and then I’d run again tomorrow. He decided to ask me to run on Thursday so he could have a day of help on Wednesday. No problemo. But now I want to run. I feel this need to get out there. I’m happy, and pain free and I want to just ROCK it!
I love running. I love the way I feel when I get up and run. Both days I was up at 5:30am I thought I would be tired. I thought I would feel drained. I thought I would be cranky, but rather the opposite happened! At the end of the day I was still alert, active and ready to go. I was happy. So now I can look forward to my run tomorrow and hope that I continue to have such amazing runs over the next few days and weeks!
I had a fabulous visit with my Oma! She came to see us from Germany. The last time she was here was just after Katrina was born. I love that she was able to travel to Canada to spend a week with us. On Saturday my father came to pick her up and now she’s spending a week with him until she heads back to Germany.
We did a lot of fun things while she was here. We went for walks, we sat and enjoyed coffees together, she helped me get the garden ready for Spring, we knitted up a storm. Steve is modeling our lovely caterpillar we made for the girls’ daycare. My Oma taught me to knit when I was like 6 so now I am excited to have her remind me how to do it. She also spent a lot of time with the girls and bought me a belated birthday gift. I’m not a big gift girl, but I wanted a new Spring jacket and that is what she bought me so I am crazy excited about it, but with how good I look in it can you blame me? 
So now I’m sad that she’s going home again. It’s hard that she lives in Germany since it means we only see her once a year, if we’re lucky. I hope that she can come next year again. For now the girls and I will have to enjoy our memories of the great visit we had!
So lots of fabulous updates. Rest weeks are over. My hip is working nicely again, I’ve started to run again, my knee and butt are doing good and it feels amazing to be back out there. I’m planning to start running in the morning again. We’ll see if that actually happens next week or if it takes longer for me to drag my butt out of bed at a crazy early hour to get that run in before work. I’m disciplined enough to get myself up for Tuesday morning yoga so I guess that I’m going to have to use that early morning alarm a lot more! I will get up early to try a run and adjust the alarm time based on how well the run goes and how long it takes me to actually get up after the alarm goes off the first time.
I’ve managed to hit 4,200km now and I am really planning to hit 5,000km preferably by December 31st of this year! It’ll be a great thing to hit that goal, and I hope that slowly increasing my distance will allow for this.
I also have been adjusting my eating since Easter, and it has worked. The scale and I are back to talking again. The last time I weighed myself I was very high (157lbs) compared to my pre-marathon weight of 147lbs. This time however, I was back down to my usual post-marathon weight of 153lbs which makes me so much happier. I need to drop these extra 5lbs but at least having those extra pounds gone makes me feel so much better about myself.
So hopefully increasing my running from very rarely to 3 or 4 days a week plus yoga will help me drop my remaining bit of weight and make me feel even more like the super awesome mom I am. This week’s goal is to run 3 times, run at least 18km and hit yoga once. I’m going to bring back training Tuesday so I can keep track of how I’m increasing my distance and speed and all that good stuff.
Lillian and Katrina watching our lovebird Shakespeare fly around.
For those of you who may not know, I am very much an alpha. I don’t mean alpha female, but rather the alpha in my family. I’m the protective mommy of my children, the hard working wife, and the loving dutiful daughter. It also means that I like to be in control, and this year has been a real lesson in letting go of the things that I have no control over.
I wanted to get pregnant quickly and easily again like I did with both Lillian and Katrina, but it’s already been almost five months, and nada. I am okay with this, though I will honestly admit that I am bummed I won’t get by ’09, ’11 and ’13 years that I wanted. I have five more months to get my 2, 4, 6 pattern (even if only for a few days before Katrina gets 3). I know that it will happen if and when my body is ready to. Whether you believe in a higher power as I do (in which case it’s his choice) or not, in which case my body and my husband’s need to align and if it takes a month or two years, I’m open to it, and good with it, though it is causing me to test me to adjust to lack of control.
Next, having my hip injury sideline my running for a long time this year and derail my race plans for a big chunk of this year. I still have plans to run a 10 km race in June but Sunday is the Waterloo half and it’s the first time I’m missing it when I wasn’t pregnant. It’s a part of recovering from an injury and dealing with a husband who is training for his first marathon. But the loss of control in my running distance, days, times, speeds, it’s all driving me crazy some days! But I am planning to start my crazy early morning runs again in May after my husband finishes his marathon and my work calms down more.
Finally, and I’m embarrassed to admit this, I’ve developed a stupid crush that should go away already. I always hated them in high school, and today it is no less annoying. I love my husband and he is my everything, and I know that as people we can’t help be notice others, and occasionally stupid stuff like this will happen but I am done with it. I hope that when my husband and I have more time together this summer that it’ll just slip away into the night and my attention will shift back to him.
So now I focus on the things I have control over. I’m working on my temper, trying to get more sleep, focusing on having a wonderful spring and summer with my family, having fun with my friends, working on increasing my fitness and just trying to be really happy. I hope you’ll stick around as I work on all these things over the next few months.
Hello blog readers! I won’t be blogging this week because my Oma is visiting from Germany! So I want to enjoy every moment of it!
She’ll be going to my father’s on the weekend and then I’ll hopefully have some time to catch up!
Happy girlie cuddle time!
I am counting down the days to my hubby’s marathon (15 days and 10 hours in case you’re curious) and spending a few days at home with my Oma with no work! Okay I say no work but I still ended up in the office today dealing with a deadline issue that could only be handled until the end of today. I also met with boss, again, when I was in. I had a long phone conversation with him yesterday, while he was working from home and I was in the office. Then today when I needed to go in to finish this thing, I emailed him to let him know if he wanted to talk to me any more I would be in at 2pm. And at 2pm he was at my door. Normally, long talks with your boss are not great, but in my case they were. I had a bit of an unnerving situation the other day and he wanted to make sure I was okay, and to talk about things with me.
I work in a University as a program advisor, and I love my job, and I make a huge difference in people’s lives, but I also am often the barer of bad news, and the dreams crusher in some cases. The other day I was warned by a prof that a student who was not well would be coming to see me. This isn’t a big deal, and is part of the job, but what was different, was a prof that I joke with a lot, made it clear that I was NOT to be alone with this student, and did so in front of our department chair. After emailing the student to arrange a meeting I needed to figure out a way to get someone in the room with me. The prof volunteered but he’s in really late, so I emailed my male coadvisor who is in by 7:30am at like 11pm and asked him to meet with me. The student showed up, (really late) and we have a great solution for him, but he was angry, and he was twitchy, and he made me feel uncomfortable, despite my coadvisor sitting right beside me. Had he not been there, I wound have felt very unsafe in that situation.
In 5 years, that’s never happened to me. I hate feeling this way. That little voice in the back of my head that thinks of all the violence that has happened in places like Dawson’s College, Newton, Virginia Tech, and so on, and it just freaked me out. The more I thought about it the worse it got. I kept thinking what if my coadvisor couldn’t come or the student had met with me before my prof warned me. He actually came to my door but I told him to go away because I had a deadline. When he got angry my coadvisor calmed him down, and I won’t have thought to do it the way he did. I’m tough, and strong and fast, but I felt so clueless and that really scares me.
After our meeting I emailed the prof to thank him for the warning. As I mulled over the meeting I started to feel worse, (I’ve had a rock in my gut since then) and emailed my boss and our department head and update/summary of what we decided was best to do with his situation, and told them about how uncomfortable I felt in that meeting. I feel bad, because I think that must have been some of the worst news my boss (and our department head was my boss for 3 years) ever had to get. Who wants to read that their employee felt uncomfortable doing their job.
I have to give my department huge credit. My prof cared enough to warn me and make sure I wasn’t alone when helping this student. My boss called me from home and spent almost a half and hour making sure I was okay, listening to what happened, hearing how I feel about it, asking loads of questions about what he can do, what the department needs to do, other times I’ve felt uncomfortable but not to this extreme, and then came again today to talk to me about it in person. It was made very clear to me by him and the head of the department, that my safely is their top concern and should always be my top priority when I do my job. He’s coming up with a list of different training they’ll make available to me, to help me learn how to handle this situations (all the training I’ve received is about students who show signs of maybe harming themselves) but he’s even thinking as technical as moving me to more busy location on our floor, so I’m less isolated, when the people in the offices beside me are not in.
I know that everyone deserves to be treated with respect and to have a chance, but those fears have always been in the back of my mind, hiding in the dark, and this situation just brought them all up to the front. I’m thankful to have such a caring department, and I know I’ll be okay, but talking about it with my boss and my husband didn’t really make that rock in my stomach go away, so I hoped writing it out would. I’ll find out if it helped, when I go back to the office on Tuesday. Thanks for listening!
I’m still processing all the scary news and images from Boston yesterday. My husband made the mistake of looking at more graphic images and can’t get them out of his head. I feel for the families of the people who were injured, who didn’t get their Boston dream, who lost loved ones in the blast.
I am thankful I can still keep these things from my daughters still at this age but I wonder what I’ll tell them when they’re old enough. Something a coworker said really stuck with me. She explains it to her children that these people are not evil, they are just taught from a very young age that this is how you get your message out and that this is acceptable. I like the idea that it’s showing a human side of things. I told Steve not to focus on the bad things he saw but rather think of all the good people who dropped everything to help those in need. The people who opened their doors to people, the medics who ran towards where people were hurt and fleeing from, the people who risked their lives to help other.
I hate that people feel this is an acceptable way to spread their message, but I’m thankful for the kindness of humanity that shines through at times like this.
Okay so I am back to around 80% of normal for my back. That is great news since I would like to get one run in before this week ends, but I can’t push it too hard so we’ll see if I get that run in. I just don’t want to make sure that I don’t anger it again by running to hard or too fast. So that means I will not be competing in my race tomorrow. I figured I would wait until tonight to make that call, and here the weather has been crazy and we lost power for part of the day, and evening so we are all a little tired so I figure that it’s best to just say whatever and not stress about it.
I have many years to run and since I hurt my back on the weekend when I was solo with m girls I’m going to be super careful and let it heal. All my trouble spots are linked and connected together. Wish me luck on my run. I have a lot of time with the girls while hubby catches up on work and runs his 32k run, so I need to steal a bit of time for me.
I run around my house and do everything that I can do all the time, and since Sunday I have been humbled and forced to ask for help where I usually insist on doing everything myself. On Sunday my husband was finishing his programming competition, and I was taking care of our little monkeys. I was careful not to do too much to anger my back or hip while taking care of the girls, but then Katrina pooped in the tub. Anyone who has kids knows that this is just part of having kids. So when it happened on Sunday I yanked both kids out of the tub without being careful and a few minutes post bath, I knew I had done something to my back and by Monday morning I was hurting, and by Monday night I was in serious pain. Tuesday am I went to my physiotherapist and my lower back is so horribly inflamed that she was limited in what she could do with me. She managed to fix my upper back so that wasn’t an issue anymore but my lower back is very angry with me now. I was told to ice it, then heat it, then ice it more to help the inflammation go down. Everyone says I should take Ibuprofen to help the swelling go down, but that’s a no-no when you are trying to get pregnant so no Ibuprofen for me. I’ll just keep icing it and hoping it gets better sooner rather than later.
But on to the title topic. I have been humbled because I am limited in what I can do for myself so rather than wincing in pain or feeling upset that nothing is getting done I’ve got my husband to help out. Apparently if I tell him what to do, and I’m hurt then he’ll get right up and do it. So that was very helpful. I even cuddled with Katrina on the couch for a long time and let him deal with Lillian painting and dripping paint all over the floor. He’s also getting over a cold, so I have banished him to the spare room in the basement. That might sound like a punishment and not a way to treat the guy who has been helping me, but in reality he is sleeping in a room that is far away from both our children, and with Katrina teething right now, that means only he will wake himself up and not be woken up by her. So even if sleeping alone in the basement sounds like a punishment, it’s actually very restful.
So hopefully my back will be back to it’s happy self sooner rather than later, and my hubby will have the energy to keep up the extra work until I am healed up.