Racin’ for the Cure and other Sunday stories

I was very excited for Little S to be participating in her first 5K. Of course, I was the only one doing the running, but being a part of this event with 45,000 other participants all joining together for the same cause, it was an extra special first race.

The pictures aren’t that great, because after getting on the wrong train with about 3 million other people and arriving with only a few minutes to feed her and start, there just wasn’t the picture time I had hoped for. And afterwards? Well, keeping her in her stroller for almost two hours without a complete and utter meltdown was no small feat. I just didn’t have what it took to try for a photo op too.

Yes, that’s her very own race bib she’s wearing as she plans her race strategy.

As if that weren’t enough excitement, when we got home, Grammy and Grampy were here! The afternoon included a trip to the park for some walking

 

and balance drills on the teeter-totter.

With a beautiful, sunny, even HOT week ahead, we’ll be enjoying the best that September has to offer.

One Week

When you’re staring down the face of a Monday, and knowing the week is going to suck, it really sets the tone for the rest of the week.

I figured it was just having to work a couple of 12 hour days and all day Saturday. But that was okay because Sunday is going to be an exciting day and Little S’ Grampy and Grampy come to town for a few days visit, so I’ll take some time off next week to recover.

However, working a lot of hours was nothing compared to how the end of the week unfolded.

Thursday starts with a bang. Big S has to be to work early and I have to leave early to get to my office by bike. Make that all happen, and get into work to hear the awful news that my friend and co-worker had been hit on her bike on the ride home from work the night before and is in ICU. She’s talking, but pretty banged up. Feeling horribly responsible as the captain of our team for bike to work month at the office, and having gotten her to bike in a few times. Another friend/co-worker and I did go and see her, and despite everything, it definitely could have been worse. Her husband had passed her on the way home, and offered her a ride. When she didn’t get home and he heard the sirens, he immediately loaded their daughter into the car and came upon the scene to see his wife’s mangled bike being loaded into the cop car. I can’t imagine how horrific the drive to the hospital must have been for him, in addition to waiting to see if she was going to be okay. And now, how hard it must be for her to not really get to see her daughter (who is about to turn 2). Her family’s in town to help with everything, so all we can do is hope for a speedy recovery for her. Once she’s home, there are so many people lined up to do anything we can for her that she will be able to focus on her recovery.

In the mean time, we got word earlier this week that our pastor’s wife had taken a turn for the worse. She’s battled ovarian cancer, and had great results with some experimental treatment about a year ago. But several months back, they discovered it had come back aggressively and with not a good prognosis. Her turn for the worse coincided with her husband (the Pastor) being in Turkey for a long planned trip. He was able to fly back early to be at her side on Thursday evening, and she passed away Friday afternoon.

And, because it has to come in three’s, our friends’ dog who ALSO has cancer seems to have taken a turn for the worse too. They’re taking what may be a last trip to the beach with her this weekend.

So, if you see me drinking a lot, or crying uncontrollably at the Race for the Cure on Sunday, you’ll understand.

The one thing that always manages to bring a smile to my face, even if it’s through tears is this, some of the bright spots of the week.

The start of regular season football and the Patriots playing a Monday night football game. Little S wanted to go to the game and wouldn’t take no for an answer

 

“Fine. I’ll just drive myself. I’ll need a little help with the pedals though. How far is Massachusetts?”

 

 

 

Instead of driving to the game, there was a compromise of going to the park instead. 

Her cheerleading eventually led them to victory. So big and little S celebrated at the Children’s Museum with career choices:

Ambulance dispatcher

Fishmonger

Building inspector

And, lately, the only way to get her to eat is if she feeds herself. Which means sometimes almost an entire chicken nugget gets stuffed in her mouth

 

At least it wasn’t thrown across the room or fed to the dog.

The week ahead is full of exciting things. Little S’ first 5K, grandparents, apples and who knows what else? Because nothing makes you appreciate what you’ve been blessed with so much as a reason to take stock of how lucky you really are.

a pickin’ we will go

Pretty much since the start of blueberry season, we’ve talked about going and picking huckleberries with Little S. We finally set a date of Labor Day weekend, thinking we would go camping in the vicinity of the prime pickin’ spot, wake up rested, pick and eat to our hearts content and make a wonderful forever memory.

And, after a gorgeous, frequently HOT summer, how are we repaid? With rain and cold weather for Labor Day weekend. Natch. We’re talking a HIGH of 39 degrees in the tallest mountains. Snow above that. Yep! I said SNOW. (Don’t remind me of the time we backpacked in snow in September. Or the 4th of July weekend. The glories of the Northwest)

ANYWAY… so, camping was scrapped. Which is fine. With the weather outside being all fall-like, it was a great time to bake and clean and stuff. But, the weather forecasters gleefully told us that Monday would be different. And like fools, we believed them.

The morning started gloriously. The sun was out, I was too warm in my long running clothes, the birds were singing (I mean, they probably were singing, but I have no actual proof or anything), Little S ate well, the dog was smiling (probably, why wouldn’t she be?) a perfect morning.

The first sign should have been when I felt a compulsion to get everyone into something not made out of cotton “in case it’s still wet up there”. And, my need to make a thermos of hot chocolate-which went by the wayside because that seemed crazy.

Well, a few miles out of town, the view changed dramatically

and by changed, I mean you could no longer see ANY views because of the downpour.

I convinced us that the weather forecasters were right this time, and it would all clear up any minute now. Surely by the time we got where we were going.

AND…. Nope. So, out came the rain cover for the backpack. Someone was showing us how much she liked it

I didn’t even know babies COULD roll their eyes!

Fortunately, the very prepared Big S has an extra pair of rainpants for me, so I’m not wandering the 50 degree woods in the rain in shorts.  And, little S insisted on seeing what was going on outside of the pack

She quickly realized we were in for 6 more weeks of winter and pulled her head back in to stay mostly dry as it rained. And then poured. And then rained some more. And then sprinkled. And then stopped. Not that we noticed because we were soaked and wandering through waist high wet bushes to pick as many huckleberries as our frozen fingers would let us.

We lasted a couple of hours and managed to get maybe three quarts of huckleberries.

 

And as we got in the car for our lunch and to dry off and warm up, the sun came out. So we decided Little S could drive us home to celebrate.

hmmm…can’t quite reach the pedals yet.

And within 30 minutes of leaving and dropping back down in elevation, the temperature climbed 15 degrees, the clouds parted, and little S slept peacefully, dreaming of huckleberries.

Now that I have three quarts of huckleberries to cook with, what’s the weather forecast? 90 degrees later this week. Ah..Mother Nature, you have a diabolical streak.

A day at the fair

The state fair is on through Labor Day. A friend of mine who is also a transplanted Midwesterner and I usually make it there to get in touch with our farm roots (even though neither of lived on a farm). She was unavailable for Little S’ inaugural trip to the fair. And what an adventure she missed!

We met Annabelle the cow

 

Got to sit on a sheep

And develop an obsession with sheep the rest of the day.

She dreamt of bacon

 

And got to meet a horse that was her size, which will make my grandparents happy!

 

She got an up close look at a chicken

And was fairly overwhelmed in the poultry barn by her favorite animals “bee-bee’s” (birdies). All a squawking loudly. The bunny rabbits that were there didn’t seem to mind it all, and she was delighted to see them as well.

The fair has a relatively new sports pavilion where Little S showed off her rock climbing skills 

Before you start calling potential sponsors, here’s the scale of that boulder she was summiting

A girl’s gotta start somewhere, right?

She still has a ways to go until she learns all of the rules of soccer

No hands, unless she’s trying to tell us she wants to be a goalie.

After her sports break, we got back to more typical fair activities. She was enthralled with team calf roping at the Junior Rodeo.

Momma couldn’t be more proud of her little cowgirl! We wanted to see how much Little S had learned by watching, so we gave her a saddle and some rope:

Turns out she’s not quite ready to turn pro yet.

That’s okay, she knows there’s more to farming than riding and roping. Like plowing the fields

I can’t imagine a cuter farm girl on her pink tractor.

Even though I didn’t grow up on a farm, we were surrounded by farmland, had classmates in FFA (yes, it’s still around) and my grandparents lived on a farm, so we were regularly exposed to animals, hay and manure shovels to use as sleds. I want Little S to know what farms are all about, so we will definitely make it a point to see that she gets to spend time with any kind of farm experience she can. If only I could talk Big S into a backyard sheep….

more videos

Making up for the long blogging break with some videos.

I told you she liked her bike. Here’s some biking and kitty happiness.

She CAN walk, she just chooses not to.

And a still from our night of 1000 babies! The hostel in NW Portland has music, brats and beer and our friends invited us. So, we went up there for a spell. Several friends and their babies were there. We got to meet 6 month old G and see his Mom whom I hadn’t seen since I worked with her years ago, before she went to work in India for several years.

He was fascinated with Little S, she just wanted to climb the stairs.

Summer sunflower waiting to unfurl

Sofia looking for birds

As August winds down, we still have many adventures in store! Although every day with Little S is an exciting adventure.

So, where were we….

In addition to the non-stop fun and cavalcade of relatives, the computer hard drive crashed, again. Computer tech on the side Mommy diagnosed it and replaced it. Dad is almost officially banned from touching the computer. He’s got some bad laptop juju. He’s going to have to get his own if he keeps breaking this one.

That notwithstanding…

We’ve had an exciting couple of weeks. We went down to Sun River for a cousin reunion of sorts. It was my uncle’s 75th birthday. I’m very fortunate that a few years ago they settled on Sun River as a great place to spend a week in the summer, and their children, my cousins head out there too. Otherwise, I would never see them, and certainly not keep in touch with them, except maybe the occasional Facebook status update or wall posting.

For this momentous birthday, my cousin who is an editor on a very successful reality show or two, spent the last year travelling around and contacting her father’s family, friends and co-workers, shooting footage of them sharing memories about her father. She spent nearly 1000 hours, over the past 3-4 months to whittle it all down into a 45 minute amazing video of his life story; the world premiere of which was in Sun River! To top it off, my sister was the chef for the weekend, cooking fabulous meals for everyone every night, including salmon that was better than restaurant quality.

The house the family was staying at was near a great park. Little S and I wandered down there a couple of days. The first day, she crawls up the landings to the arch and proceeds to climb the darn thing without any fear!

Climbing over my head, until she got to the point where she had to crawl down the other side, and that didn’t quite compute.

She crawled all the way up to the big slide and went down it like a 4 year old. It was tall and fast, but that didn’t bother her.

She also started something new over the weekend down there. Perhaps inspired by 6 year old cousin once-removed (or something like that), she chose that weekend to start standing by herself.

As if that weren’t enough, since she was summarily dismissed from the premier of the movie for not turning off her cell phone, or something like that, she decided she would prove she didn’t need us anyway and took her first unaided steps for Dad!

Of course none of this was captured on the camera, other than the cell phone camera, so, you’ll just have to take our word for it for now.

We got back from our getaway and the next morning Nana and Bim (Grandma and Grandpa) were here for a few days visit. She showed off how big she’s getting with the assisted walking down stairs maneuver

And, she’s developed a complete OBSESSION with her bike!  Once we discovered how fearless she was, she now has to wear her helmet when she rides it, which means much of the day is spent pointing to the closet door where her helmet is and signing the word for “hat”. And signing and saying bike. (which sounds like Bee)

 

She will ride that thing down small hills and pick up her feet to go faster. She will cross the street (with us as crossing guards) and ride down a whole block and back. Unfortunately, she discovered that it’s really fun to push it up a hill and then pick up her feet to roll back fast. At least she likes her helmet!

The neighbors have a little bit older kids and told us we could borrow their bike, which just sits there most of the time. Turns out, that wasn’t such a great idea.

 

Because she is in LOVE with it. She doesn’t have to do anything but steer while Mom or Dad pushes on the (broken) handle on the back (that makes us have to bend over the whole time). But, she can go much faster! So today, she ditched her bike, crawled up the driveway and told dad she wanted to ride that bike. He obliged, and now she wants nothing to do with her bike outside. She’ll still use it inside to do zooming laps around the living room, but she has MOVED ON outside. She can’t touch the pedals, so she doesn’t get any exercise with it, but it’s still her preferred mode of transport now.

There’s some great video of all of this. I’ll work on getting that up for the next installment of the Lorpi files!

(maybe this will work…)

We now pause summer for a brief blog break

It’s just been a non-stop ferris wheel o’fun here in Lorpi land. No time to stop for blogging.

So, eventually it stopped being so darn hot. And has done a complete 360 to being rainy and low 70’s here. A welcome respite from all the watering I’ve had to do this summer.

Aunt Aimee came to town for a nice long visit.

She watched Little S while Mom went away for three days/two nights of camping and music at the Gorge Amphitheatre in George, Washington. (no really, that’s the name of the town).

Mommy was very happy to get to go and see her all time favorite band, Phish. Thanks to a great co-worker, I went with a group of about 25 people for a great weekend.

We had a great camp for everyone to get some shade during the day, eat communal meals together, meet new friends, and have a little home away from home.

This was among 10,000 or so of our closest friends ALSO camped there

But none of that mattered once the music started at arguably one of the most beautiful places in the world to see a concert

So, after that exhausting weekend, Mommy’s got a little cold, but Aunt Aimee is still here to baby entertain. Next stop, more relatives, then more relatives. First, we have to survive what seems to be some horrendous teething pains. Teething baby + sick Mommy= Thankgoodnessforauntaimeehowsooncanyoumovehere.

*photo credits of venue to K8 A. & Girl Jamie

Portland, Arizona

Yep. It’s been hot.

 

And hot some more.

Most of the week over 100 degrees, 105 and 106 paid us a visit. So, it’s been a good week to stay in the A/C.

Little S entertained herself like a regular teenager

When Big S told her to hang up the phone and clean her room, I think he got the eyeroll

 

She’s not walking yet, but she’s climbing anything and everything.  

I guess that’s her way of telling us it’s dinner time.

We’re not only supposed to get back to some real weather, but there’s a lot of exciting family events coming up in the next three weeks. It should be more inspiring photography and blog-worthy.