Fun Run

Tonight, Julie was cheered on by the bambini and Ted in her first ever race!  That's right, Fans: Julie was a finisher in the Ninth Annual St. Louis Park Geezer Chase, benefiting the St. Louis Park High School Cross Country Team.  All runners over 18 were considered geezers.  Geezers got a two minute head start on the cross country team members.  The course was two miles, with some hills, and running on paths and some on grass.  Participants got water and snacks, and a tee-shirt.  There is nothing like the promise of free clothing to encourage participation from Julie, especially free garb that will make her appear to be as sporty as she aspires to be.  For sure the 10th anniversary event tee-shirt will be awesome.  Tee-shirts aside, Julie never would have done this if her friend Molly (otherwise known to you, Dear Readers, as Eli and Emma's mom) hadn't taken up running again, committed to running some race before the end of August, and asked Julie to come along.  In other words, Molly actually trained for this.  Julie was like, "I've run two miles before. . .Well, I've run-walked two miles before.  Right?"

Ted arrived with Joe and Clara fed, bathed, and pajama-ed ust before the chase-race began at 6:30pm.  Julie and Molly probably hadn't run more than a quarter of a mile before they heard the thundering of the hounds--sorry, the cross country team--streaming by.  Naturally that just stirred their competitive spirits.  Really, they'd just been waiting for the six minute mile pace group to run by before really taking things seriously.

They finished at a respectable 23:39--a 12 minute mile.  Ted and the bambini cheered for Julie at the mile mark, and of course, at the finish line.  They're the best team a wannabe sporty spicer could ever hope for.

Mile 1

Just past the finish

Not long after, Joe asked for water because he was "tied from watching you run."

Geezers, finishers

Playing With Lions

It's a rough a tumble world out there, Fans.  You think you've got problems, and then you arrive to pick up your children from school and find an incident report waiting for you informing you that your son has been hit in the face by another child.  The incident report didn't add much more--only that an ice pack had been applied along with hugs--so we went straight to the source on the way home:

Julie: So someone hit you on the face today?
Joe: Yeah.
Julie: Was it by accident?
Joe: No, it was by mean.
Julie: What did you do?
Joe: I roared like a lion.
[beat]
Ted: Before or after you were hit in the face?
Joe: Before.
Julie: What happened after?
Joe [getting impatient]: I got an ice pack.  I told Ms. Susie and got an ice pack.
Scene.

There was a moment in the above exchange when we thought he might have roared like a lion after being hit in the face.  Can you imagine it, Fans?  Roaring like a lion the next time someone does something by mean to you?  Maybe it's an idea whose time has come.

We should add that Our Hero is no worse for the wear.  Presumably ready to rumble in the jungle again today.

Our State Fair is the Best State Fair. . .

Don't miss it, don't even be late!

Rest assured, Fans, we did not miss the Great Minnesota Get Together, and we were not even late.  Sunday morning found us at the fair not long after the gates had opened.  We were making our way to the animal barns, a route which took us past the Giant Slide.  We dismissed the Giant Slide out of hand in past years because neither Ted nor Julie had ever gone down it before, so not even nostalgia was demanding that they slide down rolling waves on a piece of burlap from 150 feet in the air.  This year, however, we stopped to consider it, and then, we did it.  It's two dollars a rider, no matter their age.  Neither Joe nor Clara was old enough to ride solo, so Ted and Joe rode down together and Julie and Clara rode down together.  Julie's tummy almost instantly jumped into her throat.  You fly pretty fast down this thing!  Clara started giggling about halfway down and the first words out of her mouth after we'd coasted to a stop at the bottom were "Let's do it again!"  After Joe emerged from his slide-induced happy stupefaction, he also wanted to go again.  But we did not.  We save it for another year.  Besides, we had animals to visit.

First up were the chickens because, you know, there's nothing like visiting the roosters at what might as well be the crack of dawn.  (In a word: loud.)  We also visited the sheep, horse, cow, and pig barns.  After the animal barns, we made our way across the fairgrounds, eating as we went, to the John Deere tent where Joe and Clara climbed all over the equipment, including a $242,000 tractor.  Joe was disappointed that all of the vehicles seemed to be missing keys.

We managed to keep Clara awake on the ride home and she took a nearly four hour nap in the afternoon.  Joe has his big boy rep to maintain so did not not nap, but fell asleep in the midst of Stuart Little (as Stuart is heading off in a boat in the Central Park pond and the air is thick with nautical fog!) and did not even rouse as he was carried in to bed.

After the Giant Slide.

That's actually a turkey.

It takes approximately 385 squirts of milk to make a gallon.

Ted visited the oink booth, too.  He just didn't get ears.

Birdie reunited with John Deere.

"How do I turn it on?"

Climb Every Playground

The other week, we arrived at the KinderCare to collect the bambini, to be told that Clara had not been a good listener.  She had, apparently, broke from the pack on the way in from outside, and torn about the big kid playground.  Here, we pause to explain the the outdoor play area is divided in two, with the little kid area featuring a play house and some push-a-long bikes, and the big kid area featuring a full out jungle gym, a play house, and tricycles.  Clara apparently was made to hold the hem of Ms. Manisha's shirt all the way inside which she did not like.  Wild horses can't be broken, Brigade.  Who's with us?

This morning found us at Wolfe Park following Joe's haircut and frankly, it's abundantly clear why Clara made a break for the big kid playground at school the other week ago: she tears it up on the playground.  See these ladder things?

She climbed both of them like it weren't no thing!  She zips around things like a little. . .something.  She's so surefooted and completely graceful.  It's really something to see.

 

A First (But Not the One We Were Expecting)

Brigade, you will no doubt recall that we were going to promote Birdie to a Big Girl Bed this weekend.  That was before Julie remembered that she had to attend an event for work Saturday evening that began at 7pm.  Julie couldn't imagine missing putting Clara to bed in her Big Girl Bed for the first time, so we have postponed the big event until next weekend.

But Julie missed a big event anyway!  Tonight, Ted read to Joe from a chapter book: Stuart Little, which we checked out from the library this (rainy) afternoon.  Ted reports that he read the first three chapters of it to Joe.  Julie takes a small measure of comfort from the fact that Stuart Little is not a book she remembers with special fondness from her own childhood, and from the fact that as tied as her parents are to her memories of reading, she recalls her first chapter book being read to her by a teacher (Miss Crawford, second grade, Beezus and Ramona).  Even so, Julie is pretty excited to pick up tomorrow night with chapter four.

It is also worth mentioning in this missive that while we were at the library this afternoon, a young girl made Joe and Clara's acquaintance.  She was perhaps seven or eight, and as such, seemed extraordinarily worldly to Joe, especially.  An older woman!  It was amusing to see her march up to the bambini in the children's play area, where there is a large toy house, ask if she could play with them, and then promptly take charge: "I know what we'll do.  Here, you take this one [a doll], and she can have this one [another doll--you get the idea], and then I'll take this one." Later, she had the dolls hide so Joe could find them which meant she had Joe turning around and closing his eyes so she could hide the dolls.  Clara was less entranced by this older siren.  Birdie danced off to find, as it turned out, little pencils of the sort that float about at golf courses and public libraries.  She was ferrying them over one at a time to Julie who was counting them as Birdie passed them over.  The Siren by this time had moved on to the Lincoln Logs at the table and muttered under her breath, "She'll probably bring you however many there are."  The Siren was quite something, and it was quite something to see her cast her spell over our young man.