Continual State of Becoming

Why does dinner have to come every night?  Ugh. I have been struggling with cooking dinner lately.  Either I'm just not in the mood to plan, prep, cook, and clean-up, or I do all of that and for some reason or another the food just doesn't turn out like it used to.  I'm in a cooking rut, a long one, it's going on a few months now.  It'd be nice if I could just give up dinners for a few weeks or a few months, but I can't.  Especially since I have kids to feed.  So my solution to this problem has been to make very simple and easy meals. The other night I caved and made the kids chicken nuggets and tater tots.  Real kid friendly food.  Except they didn't eat it.  Matt and I ate spicy orange glazed salmon (one of the few nice recipes that still works for me), the kids weren't interested in that either.  There's been a lot of ravioli and meatballs (dylan eats the ravioli, aaron eats the meatballs), baked chicken, ordering out, and frozen ...

Dylan is finally interested in learning how to ride a bike.  So on go the training wheels and helmet, and off he goes... Checking out the bike. Ready to go! I think you need to put up the kick stand first ;) "This is soooo hard." Keep going, pedal pedal pedal Gotta work on steering too. He got the hang of it pretty quick (especially on the decline, still needed some pushes going up) There he goes! Love the attitude. All in all a good experience.  Ready for more soon!  He's looking forward to getting good enough to ride his bike to the pool.

Today I opted for a low key day at home.  I wish it were really a lazy day, but that's just not in our family's vocabulary at this point.  For a little while both boys were playing quietly in the living room... Aaron was "reading" his animal book, and Dylan was playing with a car and doing nothing in the wonderful way you get to do nothing as a kid.  I managed to grab a few snapshots while the peace lasted. (lots of pictures) Just hanging around He found this book fascinating. Pointing at all the interesting animals. Time for a change of position Climbs up in no time. Back to reading More pointing. Dylan stops by to play. Just laying around being a kid. And just because I can't resist this one...  WALKING!!

These holiday 5ks are turning into a thing.  Mother's day, father's day, and now 4th of July.  This time Matt and I both ran, along with most of my family (mom, dad, sarah, jeremy, liz, devin, and even my uncle john).  And a big thank you to Rebecca and my Aunt Shirley who watched the kids while we were running!  Everyone did really well, and despite the huge crowd (2500 runners starting in Reston Town Center), it was a good race.  Uncle John blew us all away finishing in about 24 minutes, but then again he's doing an Iron Man in August, so he's really on top of this.  Jeremy finished next in about 33 mins... and I came in shortly after that with a new record time of 33:28!  I could hardly believe it!  It puts my mile pace at 10:51.  What?  I ran 3 miles in under 11 minutes each????  I'm really happy with my time and I could definitely tell that my training has been paying off.  I mean, even when I was running several years ago...

The house has finally been painted.  No more pink, no more poopy yellow, and no more darkness.  We're still putting rooms back together and we need to add art to the wall (and clean up the clutter), but everything looks so much better already.  Yay! Dining Room Family Room Kitchen  Music Room Accent wall in the music room

Hmmm...  My running did not go at all close to how I wanted and needed it to.  In many ways I feel like I let myself down, but I'm trying not to be too hard on myself.  I'm trying to remind myself that any running I do is better than nothing at all. Plus I think I'm past the point where I'm going to be reaching milestones every other week... "oh look, I ran 10 minutes without stopping"  "Wow! I made it 6 miles today"  "Yay, I managed to decrease my pace by a full minute"  Because at this point I am where I am, and it's going to take time to improve.  It's totally anticlimatic, but I guess I shouldn't expect to go from non-runner to super-runner in like 3 months.  I mean, really.  So here are my June stats: Overall mileage:  about 47 miles... not enough for someone who thought they were training for a 20k.  I should have been closer to 60. Races:  no June races for me, but I am doing one on Thursday Paces:  My 2-4 mil...

I've been trying to take some occasional self portraits here and there.  Not so much because I think I make an awesome photo model, I feel super self conscious and weird, but I think it's good practice, especially when I have to use my tripod. This was taken in October/November, before I really knew anything about anything and was just playing around with the camera a lot.  I want to use this to compare more recent and future shots....  looking away from the camera because looking right at the camera felt awkward and uncomfortable (though now I think "what the heck was I supposed to be looking at in this picture????  --real life answer:  anything but the camera... because it's scary).  Actually looking at the camera felt fine, but looking at the images of myself looking at the camera felt really awkward and uncomfortable.  I still need to work on that.

I played around with White Balance last night.  I didn't really know what I was doing, but even with that taken into consideration I think I'm on the right track for figuring out how to get a better white balance.  All part of my effort to get my pictures better SOOC.  Though WB is one of the easier adjustments to make on a raw file, but I still think this is a good thing for me to figure out. These were all taken in my living room at about 9pm, so the only source of light is from our ceiling fan lights... normally all of the pictures would be very yellow.  From what I've read sometimes you can adjust the Kelvin levels on your camera to get a very specific white balance.  As far as I could tell, my camera doesn't have the feature.  So instead I used a picture of our freshly painted and very empty white wall in the living room to customize my WB.  Here we go: Camera set to Auto WB.  The best option from the presets, but still really really yel...

So I already broke the news on Facebook, but I'll go into a little more detail here... I've decided not to run the Leesburg 20k this year.  It was a tough call to make.  I've been thinking about it for a few weeks now... I know I'm not ready for it.  But I thought that if I just ignored that, I'd be able to push through and do it anyway.  Unfortunately my body doesn't work that way.  I've been having pain in my left leg (knee and hip) for the last few weeks, I haven't managed to hit 8 miles on my last 3 attempts for various reasons (this week my body just started walking after 5.5 miles-- and there was nothing I could do about it), and time is just not on my side.  Despite starting to run in March, it just wasn't enough time to really prepare.  I'm sure that I could run/walk it.  But I just don't really see the point of that.  I mean, I can walk 12.4 miles today...  it's not very hard, so where's the accomplishment in that?  I rea...

We spend a good amount of our time playing in the living room.  On this particular day Dylan and Matt had gone out to a baseball game so it was just me and Aaron for the evening.  Nothing significant happened, but I wanted to grab a few shots not just of him doing his typical one year old thing, but of me playing with him (which was hard because I couldn't really see where the frame was, and I used my 50mm, so a lot of the shots didn't turn out...  A wide angle lens is on the top of my "next to purchase" list) Moms need to be photographed too. :) This nice clean space won't last long.  Playing with Woofie and some trucks.  It gets messy quickly. Now time to cruise up and down the couch. Going back for round two... got a little distracted by the library book. Sizing up his course. Look at that happiness :)  Happy to catch mom! Aaron's new favorite place to play is on the fireplace. ...