Trail 5K

On a cool, wet Saturday in early May, Natalie and I participated in our first ever Trail 5K race! It was put on by my friend Maya's horse rescue, Hope's Legacy, on the farm where they keep all of their rescues. Since Natalie and I have been walking so much, and we do occasionally add in some running, we thought we would tackle it! Plus, the money all went to a very good cause.

All 4 of us actually signed up, but when the morning of the race was wet and muddy the boys backed out of going. So Natalie and I put on our layers, packed another set of socks and shoes (as we knew our feet would get wet), and headed out to Afton for the event!

It was drizzling on and off as we arrived, and we definitely had to be careful of some muddy parts on the trail. But we had a great time looping around the farm, and made decent time. Was it my fastest? No. But there were a lot of hills, it was quite slippery, and I couldn't run the whole thing. Natalie actually beat my final time by about 10 seconds, as she put on speed at the end in order to beat me. Ha!

 

We were both very proud of ourselves for doing something new like this!

After the race, they posted photos on FB and I found one decent one of each of us.

Look, she's out in front of me here, too!

Afterwards, we changed out of our wet shoes into the rain boots we brought, and went around to meet some of the horses, check out the vendors who attended, etc. Natalie loved getting to pet the donkeys, horses, and even mini horses. In fact, she fed a treat to a mini horse who Maya said had not let anyone get that close before! My girl loves animals, just like her mom.

A spring day in Albemarle/Nelson

On a lovely spring weekend day, I wanted to have a family day in our new area: get out, enjoy the spring weather, and show the kids how lovely their new home is, after the gray of winter was finally gone! So, we hit up 3 places in Albemarle and Nelson Counties. First up: Chiles Peach Orchard, who was having a day of spring fun with wagon rides...

Baby chicks - these were actually turkey chicks!

And treats to enjoy, including cider from Bold Rock Cider, which spurred our journey out to Nelson County. Our ultimate goal was to hit the actual cidery, but we wanted to have some lunch first. So, we stopped on our way at Blue Mountain Brewery, which has a gorgeous outdoor eating area and is only about 3 miles from the house I grew up in! This place definitely did not exist when I lived there.

The kids enjoyed the food, and were even more excited by the games. Nothing like corn hole to burn off some post-lunch energy!

We then headed down Rte 151 to Bold Rock, where we all enjoyed some cider. In addition to the alcoholic cider they serve, they also have non alcoholic which the kids really enjoyed! We took our drinks out back towards the river.

And then, after getting back...we all crashed out after a long, but fun, day :)

Henry gets a new axe

Henry has had an acoustic guitar for a while now (it was a Christmas present a couple of years ago), but he hadn't expressed much interest in it until recently. After moving, though, he started talking more about taking guitar lessons. I saw an ad that Music & Arts was having a sale where if you bought a month of guitar lessons, you got a guitar for free, so we headed to their open house for a trial group class. Henry was hooked from the start!

Music & Arts did their job - we walked out with the free guitar, but also needed to purchase an amp and a guitar case (shown strapped to his back below with said guitar inside)... but he was so excited about the whole thing that we just couldn't say no!

He immediately went upstairs and started playing the one chord/song he had learned. I've heard this multiple times already, and he gets better all the time! We are now about 2.5 months into lessons, and he's learned the main chords to quite a few songs.

I absolutely love the music side of his room - it shows his personality so well and makes him so happy!

Wiggle butt!

I stumbled across these two videos we took of Lucy in January and thought I'd share here. We've joked that her nickname is "wiggle butt"...I think it's pretty obvious why in these videos.

She just gets SO excited when she sees the kids, or knows that they're coming home.

She's even learned roughly when they'll be coming home from school every day, and about 20 minutes before the bus arrives, Lucy gets antsy and starts pacing around, staring out of all the windows for them. We've taken to putting on her electric collar and letting her have some outdoor fun time for that period, when weather permits. She's learned to stay up by the house, waiting for the kids to greet her as they get off the bus.

We've even started to walk Lucy up our street without the leash on; I want her to get to the point where she will listen and stay with us even when off leash. I did it this morning with both kids and she stayed with us quite well! Ran some with Henry, stopped when she got a bit ahead, and didn't wander off to sniff any other dogs. Very proud of her!

Hey, guess what? We moved!

If you've been living in a cave, you might have missed the fact that we moved in November 2018! We started the process almost a year ago, just looking at houses in Charlottesville to see if something might strike us. Would we want to actually move, or is C'ville just great in our memories? Could we find a neighborhood we liked? A house? What about schools? Well, in 3 visits down to C'ville (the last one with the kids, after we told them about the idea), we found a neighborhood, a house, and schools that we really liked. We put an offer in, and after about 7 weeks (and some moments of anxiety about selling!) we were able to sell our house, get everything organized, and head 2 hours south.

Leaving Leesburg wasn't easy; we'd been there for 12 years, which is the longest I'd ever lived anywhere. We loved our life there, our friends, activities - all of it. Leaving wasn't a decision we came to lightly, but it's been a really good one for all of us, even if we were sad to leave!

But we were able to find this amazing house, which has been one of the biggest pluses for all 4 of us. The kids absolutely love their rooms, I love how separated we are from the houses around us (an acre puts some nice distance between us and them!), and we've met some really nice folks in the neighborhood.

I can't wait to see what it looks like once everything is in bloom!

The move itself went off with nary a hitch - we lost one lamp and some pixels on our TV, but otherwise everything survived. The company sent excellent packers (yep, we paid to have ourselves packed) who did such a great job over the course of 3 days. The moving team was also great, as this was a pretty big job. Our new driveway is steep enough that the truck couldn't make it up, which made for a bit more work for them. The kids found the whole process fascinating.

But I think we all settled in pretty well to our new space!

 

I was going to do another post showing the modifications we made (mostly cosmetic, as we had almost all of the house painted; I was not into the southwest style colors that were in the house when we purchased), but again, I'm trying to streamline these posts! Plus it looks like I never took good after photos (but lots of the terrible terra cotta before!); if I ever get around to taking them maybe I'll put together a post. But for posterity, so that I can remember 10 years from now, we took away the cream color (such as shown in the kitchen above), and repainted the living room, kitchen, upstairs hallway, and guest room a lovely light gray (replacing multiple shades of cream, yellow, and terra cotta in the process). We removed the 3 shades of peach and cream in our master suite, and covered them with 2 shades of neutral mauve (although the bathroom is pretty purple!). And the kids rooms went from plain white to a Parisian blue for Natalie, and Star Wars-inspired gray, charcoal gray, black, and red for Henry. Exciting all around to make our new home really feel like OURS!

Inaugural half-marathon

After I cut my hair, and had some new head shots taken, I had one more new thing to do - walk a half marathon! I set this as a goal for myself after really stepping up my weekly walks during the first half of 2018. Why not try to go from my regular 4-6 miles to do a full half marathon? I can train for that! Since I don't like the heat, I didn't want to do this during the summer, so I set a date in October (also because October is the best month, as we all know!). I found a recommended training schedule for runners who are doing a half marathon, and was able to stick to it (mostly) for the 7 weeks before my scheduled walk.

I decided to walk from the end of the W&OD trail in Purcellville back home to Leesburg. Because I wanted the walk to be novel, I never trained on that part of the trail, sticking instead to my normal routes through Leesburg (but varying them up some to keep it interesting). The longest training walk I did was 10 miles (as I missed the week I was supposed to do a 12 mile walk), but I felt good about my ability to go 13.1.

Evan and the kids took me out to Purcellville to the end of the trail, so I could start there!

I was ready to go with my arm band, my headphones, and some snacks in my belt pouch.

Oh yeah, and we brought Lucy too! We also stopped at Starbucks so I could get my usual refresher for the first part of the walk... and then it was time to start!

I did take selfies at each mile, but I'm not going to post them all here. Just a few to show progress... oh, and some pretty sites I saw along the way.

Mile 2

Before mile 3:

During Mile 4:

Mile 6 - it's getting warmer out there!

During mile 6, I walked the trail underpass at the Route 9 intersection in Hamilton. Turns out that just past there is this great old bridge that you walk through!

Mile 7, during pee break #3 (yep that refresher went right through me! Luckily the trail was pretty deserted) and stretch break #1

Mile 8 - where I also took stretch break #2. And yep, definitely warmer out at this point!

Mile 10 - I'm back in "civilization!" This was on the outskirts of Leesburg.

At Mile 11, I left the trail at the kids' school to head back towards my house. The final 2 miles were not on the trail. Mile 12 photo: just past the bridge over Rte 15 bypass on Sycolin Rd.

And finally...Mile 13.1! Right in front of my house. I did it!

All in all, I walked the whole thing in just over 3 and a half hours. Average pace was the highest I've EVER done on a walk - the trail is such an amazing place to walk! I love how the Fitbit app tracked everything - really fantastic to see my progress.

In fact, looking at the mile times, it's even more obvious how much easier it is to walk on the trail - the last two miles were by far my slowest, and they were once I had left the trail.

Overall, I have to say I am really proud that I did that, and I want to do another one! Unfortunately there is not a great trail like the W&OD in Charlottesville (I really miss that thing), but I'm sure I can figure out something. I haven't gone longer than about 5 miles since we moved, so I need to step up the training as it gets warmer and try to do this again! 

Also, a big thank you to everyone who donated, as I did this as a fundraiser for St. Jude's (Natalie chose the charity). It really meant a lot to me.

Short hair, don't care!

So, after years of having crazy long hair, I decided enough was enough! I was tired of how long it took to dry. How it constantly got stuck under my purse strap. How much I was shedding EVERYWHERE. And once I realized I had the required 9" of hair to donate...well, what else could a girl do but make the big cut? That's exactly what I did just after my birthday in October.

Before:

After the chop! 9" gone just like that.

 

Add some color (because who doesn't want to add some kicky pink/red to their hair?)

Finish the cut and blow it all dry, and...voila! A kicky new do for fall/winter.

 

I love how it came out. So much fun, so much lighter, and PINK! I felt like a rock star.

Of course that color does not stay in for nearly as long as you'd like for it to (damn those giant red molecules!), so by the holidays the pink was pretty much gone, and it had actually grown a good amount! So, it was time to get a trim and redo the color, as the bottom was looking quite a bit lighter than the top. This time, since we'd moved, I couldn't easily go to my friend and stylist JJ in Leesburg, so instead I had my new family member (step-niece, I suppose?) do it, after she'd done such a lovely job on all of our hair at my sister's wedding. Callie gave me a great trim and redid the red (although a bit more toned down) in the bottom.

And finally, finally I let Natalie get the color in her hair that she's been wanting for ages. Because of dance requirements we'd had to wait, and then I forgot when I told her we could do it last summer. So finally I upheld my promise and Callie applied a nice big chunk of purple/pink to Natalie's hair! It went in really dark like this, and has faded now to an awesome magenta. She loves it and it looks so great in her hair!

Hershey Park September 2018

We'd had a bunch of friends take their kids up to Hershey Park over the past year or so, and while we were still close enough to do a day trip to Hershey, we thought we should take ours. The kids didn't really get a big vacation in 2018 - just the long weekend at the Outer Banks with me in August - so we thought this would be a great weekend day activity for us to do. The kids were definitely on board!

We had some difficulty actually accessing the parking, as we were waylaid by off-site parking for a big RV expo that was being held at the convention center there. Once we realized the actual parking was NOT a mile away, we were able to park and easily walk over to the Park. We got our map, grabbed some food (as it was almost lunch time when we arrived), and started off on some rides!

The Park was VERY full that day, way more than they anticipated, due to the RV show. A bunch of concessions areas actually ran out of food by the end of the night! This meant that there were lines for the rides, and events like the sea lion show were quite full. Luckily we got there early, got some good seats, and the kids were brave enough to go down front before the show and ask the zoo keeper some questions!

We then found a couple of rides that the kids were VERY excited to go on (and with no lines!), like the Frog Hopper. We all agreed this was about as close to the death drop as any of us wanted to go.

 

It was a hot day (as you can probably tell from the pictures!), but everyone really got along well. Even when we waited a RIDICULOUSLY long time for the drive-your-own-car ride that the kids really wanted to do but was totally not worth it but by that point we were committed so we stuck it out.

We went on a kiddie roller coaster (very similar to the one we all enjoyed at Kings Dominion the year before). Here are Evan and Henry going a second time; Natalie had her fill when her hat blew off of her head on it, and we had to wait to get it back until it was turned into lost and found later in the day by maintenance. Luckily, crisis was averted, and we did get it back!

We also explored the small zoo attached to the Park, and by the time we made our way back, had some dinner, rode a few more rides...it was night! All day we had wanted to do the "ski lift" across the park, but the line was crazy long. It thinned out some as people left the park, so we finally had our chance! That's Evan and Henry in the car up ahead of Natalie and I.

I had to get a shot of this roller coaster from up high, as it was Natalie's first real roller coaster! She really wanted to try one, and Evan was willing to do it with her (too much of a drop for me). She loved it! I think if the lines had been shorter she might have gone again, but one wait was enough. I was so proud of her for going on an adult ride and not being scared! She's braver than I am.

Henry wanted to try something that was akin to the big roller coaster (which he not only was too short for, but also didn't really have much interest in). I looked, and Hershey Park does have a ride similar to Avalanche at Kings Dominion, where you go around and around without a big drop down. We convinced him to try it with us, and although he was nervous he LOVED it! He and Evan rode it 3 times! Natalie and I started getting a little nauseous after 2 rides, so we were done. Really proud of them both for trying something different! 

I couldn't get video of that, so here he is on the swings at night. 

All in all, we had an AWESOME day at the park. We didn't quite close it down, but we came close. We all tried some new things, we were able to find food for everyone (there were a lot of chicken nuggets eaten that day), and despite the heat and crowds we had a blast. It's a bit far for us to go back again in 2019, but maybe we can make it to Busch Gardens this year and complete the local amusement park trifecta!