Dave's Marathon Training

Here is Dave getting ready to go out for his late night run.

He runs around 9 or 10 at night (crazy I know) so we can hang out for a bit after the kids are down. He is training to run a marathon this June in California. It is so awesome! We don't get to run together during the week, but on weekends for his long runs, we have been running together. It's so nice running together. We get to talk about a ton of random stuff that we usually don't have the time/energy for. I love it!

Ragnar Race

This month I ran a race called the Ragnar Del Sol race. The race is a total of 202 miles, from Prescott AZ to Tempe AZ, run in 24 hours. We had 12 girls on our team split between two vans and two drivers. We each ran 3 legs of the race ranging in distances from 3 to 10 miles depending on how many hills were in your legs. It was AMAZING! Definitely super hard to do, but totally worth it!!

This is a picture of everyone in our van before we started running. If you look close you can see we're all smiling and don't have that crazy look in our eyes that came later in the race from sore muscles and exhaustion.

Here I am getting ready to hop out of the van on my first leg.

This was about 20 hours into the race and we were getting pretty loopy.

Renaissance Festival

Every year there is a Renaissance Festival that falls right on Dave and Eva's birthday. So rather than do a big birthday party for her, we convinced Eva to go to the Renaissance Festival with some friends. It was a fun day of being silly and looking at shops. It's such a fun place to go hang out!

Random Pics

Here are some random pictures from our life the last couple of days.

I love this picture. The kids were laughing so hard at Porter giving Ivy a piggy back ride. I love Eva's face in the picture, you can totally tell how hard she was laughing!

Eva got these cute glasses at the dentist and she wouldn't take them off the whole day. She's definitely a hippy at heart.

Ivy has started to love dressing up like a princess. She is very specific about what she likes to wear. It's so cute when she says "princess." The hard part is when she wants to wear it out of the house! Oh the fun fits!!

Every dad seems to become a horse as soon as he gets home from work. It surprises me that all the kids fit on their Dad!

Sledding in Flagstaff

We realized that the last time we played in the snow was when EVA was about 18 months old. That puts us about 3 years with no snow. The kids had been talking a lot about how much they wanted to play in the snow. So we decided to head to Flagstaff, AZ, about 3 hours North of Phoenix, where they get snow.

So yesterday morning we packed up and headed North. The car ride up the kids talked about all the fun things they were going to do, "We're gonna go sledding, have a snowball fight, make a snowman, go ice skating, ...." They had quite a list! While we didn't do everything on their list we did get a chance to go sledding and have a good snowball fight.

Because Dave and I are from Utah and Idaho, we were not braced for what sledding in AZ entails. There are two places in Flagstaff where you can go sledding. We went to Wing Mountain and had to PAY $10 to park. Luckily there were a ton of hills to sled on, but it was CROWDED! There were probably about 1000 people crammed on about 2 acres. I have never had to wait in line to sled before! It was weird! They hadn't had snow for a while so our $10 parking fee went to man-made snow. It was more like sledding on black ice than on snow. Needless to say, we went SUPER fast down the hills and SUPER far! It was awesome.

Ivy was less than thrilled with the whole experience. She had fun going down about 2 times, then complained the rest of the time. She refused to wear her gloves then cried about her cold fingers. She loved making and throwing snowballs, but could only get one good throw in before her fingers were too cold.

Porter had one of those sledding disks and could totally book it down the hills. Eva had a cute purple two-person sled that, after a few times down, she would take down on her own. One time, Porter and Eva decided to race and see who's sled was faster. Eva totally rocked it! She got to the bottom and hoped up to do her victory dance and rub it in, when she totally got run over by a sled. The sled went right over the top of her, and she cut up her lip a bit and hurt her arm. Luckily we were ready to head home anyway.

I was surprised how excited Dave and I were to go sledding. We were as giddy as the kids to go play in the snow. Now that we have sleds and our warm clothes, we're gonna wait till the next snowstorm, call in sick to school and work and go up to play in the powder.

Merry Christmas from Grandma and Grandpa Carr

For Christmas this year, Grandma and Grandpa Carr came out for a visit. They got in the evening of the day after Christmas. It was SO much fun to have them here! We had asked them to bring some old winter clothes so we could go sledding in Flagstaff, but they showed up with tons of fun new winter stuff! The kids went CRAZY for it all! While it was a chilly 62 degrees, the kids were plenty warm in their snow pants, puffy snow coat, fleece hats, ski gloves, and sweaters while they took Snickers for a walk around our block. Whew, I was pretty relieved to see that they didn't loose any limbs to frost bite!

Hippy Eva

For Christmas Eva got some fun hats and hair things. She's so cute and such a ham anytime we pick up the camera. I don't know where she got the idea to flash the peace sign in her latest pictures, but it goes so well with her new hair bows!

Christmas TIME!!

For Christmas Eve we had the kids open their PJs and the presents that we all got each other. This was the first year that we all drew names and bought presents for each other. It made it really fun and exciting.

For Christmas this year we decided we were going to do it "small". This was great in theory, but because I start buying/hiding Christmas presents in July, we ended up discovering a bunch of things we had already bought and hid in different places around the house. So during our last minute wrapping, I kept having to send Dave to get the presents out of the attic, closet, under the bed, in my secret drawer, and in the trunk of Dave's car. So we ended up with more than we meant to. It was a lot of fun and super exciting to rediscover the presents we had fallen in love with throughout the year.

Children's Shows

Has anyone every seen the Disney movie, Up? If you haven't, then you won't want to read the rest of my post.

We were watching it together as a family the other day never suspecting how truly scary it is for kids. Within the first couple of minutes two cute kids are introduced and hang out and end up getting married to discover that they can't have kids. Eva was very upset by the whole concept that some people can't have babies. She was very distressed, and Dave explained that some people can't have babies, but they share their love in different ways. Not comforted by the response, but accepting it as truth, we kept watching the movie.

During the next part of the show, this great lady that the man loves so much gets sick and dies. Eva asked Dave again why she died. Dave explained that sometimes people get sick and die. He then keeps explaining that everyone dies at some point in their lives. Eva looks up at him and asks "Even YOU? Are you going to die Dad?" Dave looks around for help and I carefully keep my attention on my book. He answers honestly that yes, some day he's gonna die. Eva looks back and the show and then BURSTS out sobbing!! Big sobs that shake her whole body and all she can get out is, "I DON'T WANT YOU TO DIE! PLEASE DON'T DIE DADDY!" Even though we didn't want to make any promises that we can't keep, we ended up reassuring her that Dad isn't going to die for a really really long time. After a few more minutes, she settled down for the rest of the movie.

We thought we were out of the woods with emotional trauma this Christmas season at least, but then we took a trip down memory lane and watched Annie with the kids. Unfortunately for me, I was sitting by Eva and got tagged with the explanation of what an "orphan" is. I explained that sometimes kids loose their Moms and Dads and they don't have anyone to take care of them and that's an orphan. She was very worried and her followup question was, "How do they loose their Mom and Dad?" Once again we touched on the topic of death but this time instead of loosing just Dad, there is a possibility of loosing Mom too...she didn't shed one tear. Didn't phase her in the least. She just said OK and went back to watching her show. Guess who is her favorite parent!! :)

Playing Around

While I was busy making Christmas cookies and candy, Ivy discovered her own secret spot. She spent a good hour playing in this little cupboard. I gave her a flashlight and some crackers and she was THRILLED!