Running Family

It can definitely be said that parents "run around chasing their kids" (as a graduate student, I feel an irresistable temptation to add a footnote/endnote/reference to any quotes). Yesterday, we decided to do run around literally: Teia and I would run in a local 5K (the Danny Oates 5k, held on the morning of Bedford Day) and Kai and Louise would take part in the Kiddies Run held in an adjacent field. Teia would be quite the little queen as the soul passenger in the double-wide Chariot jogger; we hoped she wouldn't panic w/o her brother there to comfort her (or maybe she would enjoy the experience of sitting peacefully w/o a constant elbow in the chest??? Time would tell....) Meanwhile, Kai was busy all week doing sprints in the house to be tuned up. He was all business, this one.

We got there a little late and had to rush over to our respective starting lines. Here is Kai, toeing the line, with his game face on and laser-focus on the finish line (which was across a soccer field).

Sadly, I wasn't able to watch the Red & Black Flash do his thing but Louise said he did great. He was entered into the 3-4 yr age group and as one would expect, when the 'Go' signal was given, the start wasn't quite the Olympics 100m dash. A few kids needed reminders, some needed steering as little bodies spread over the field like random water droplets. Kai had a blast running across the field, so much so that when he was done, the 5-6 yr age groupers started, he decided to do THAT race too! (he also got a 2nd medal; they must have thought he was quite a little 5 yr old!)

Afterwards, he was quite pleased with his performance: all that hard training, early morning starts, strict diet regimen, and abstinence had paid off!

Meanwhile, in the 'big kids' race, Teia and I were wondering where to position ourselves. Too far back and I'd be walking, but I still felt a little shy about toeing the front line w/ this ginormous stroller. So I decided to take the side (thinking it'd be easier to scoot around people) a couple rows back. Unfortunately, a pack of HS girls took position nearby, and with earplugs firmly in-place, proceeded to block the road for a good 1/4 mile. I was also on the wrong side of the road, the side everyone ELSE was hugging, so there was no where to scoot outside to.

Luckily, this was a very local race where the 'ringers' were mostly HS XC runners. There were about 200+ entrants, so after a short distance, space quickly opened up and Teia and I started to move up - a little TOO quickly. I felt a little pent-up after the slow start and it felt so good to have some open room (and pass people w/ a stroller) that all of a sudden I was right behind the leaders! By the way, passing people w/ a stroller is like passing a Porsche while driving a Minivan. Childish, unnecessary, even a little dangerous, but still satisfying!

The leaders in this case were mostly HS runners w/ one older guy. I don't think any of them were very impressed to be sharing the lead w/ a baby stroller and at about the halfway point, the eventual winner took off. I was too cooked from my leap to the front and I settled/waddled most of the way home. At one point, another HS kid was running near me and I was tempted to say to him "You're not going to let a guy w/ a stroller beat you, are you??" but he got the message anyway and left me in the dust. So, no, he wasn't going to let a guy w/ a stroller beat him!

Passing the crowds was interesting - most clapped, but I did notice a few people just staring. I wondered if they thought "How dare he endanger that child by running in a race?" At the finish, after I walked through the chute, a woman walked up and peered into the stroller (not saying a word, mind you) as if to check that the child was OK and she didn't have to call Child Services. I tell you, there was an odd vibe sometimes...

But overall, most people cheered happily. They seemed to know most of the other runners so most people were cheered by name. As I came near the finish line, I scanned for Louise and Kai, hoping he wasn't still running himself (or decided to join the 5K after his cross-field warmups). I saw them at the final corner, so I figured I better put my tongue back into my mouth, straighten my posture, and look like I'm doing something other than suffering...

Teia took the whole race in-stride w/ nary a peep. At one point, as a woman cheered me on, Teia let out a little hoot; I assumed she was cheering me on too, or she was saying "C'mon dad, step on it! I finished my mum-mum 1.2miles ago and I need a diaper change!"

Oh, the race also had pretty good score for such a small race: bananas, juice from Whole Foods, tea bags (yeah, I didn't get it either, but I grabbed some) and a new Nalgeen bottle (I won my age group: I told you it was a small race!!). Ironically, Louise had just given me heck over the cleanliness of my current Nalgeen bottle that morning, so I was pretty pleased to check that box off (the box that says "Get a new Nalgeen bottle")!

Little Miss Fiesty

When Teia was born I told Greg that she was a fiesty one. He laughed at me and scoffed that I couldn't possibly know that based on knowing her for 24 hours. She was a pretty mellow little baby so I also started to doubt my initial impressions of her too. But lately even Greg has conceded that we might be in for it with this one.

Our Peach is keeping us on our toes these days. Seems ever since she turned 11 months old she can do anything and everything. She is a veritable chatterbox and some of that chatter is starting to sound more and more like words. We hear "Mama!" shrieked if I am not within an eyeball's distance. The other day she said "Ba-bye" to Dada when he headed out to school and many things in our house are called "A-ma!" and "Buh!" She likes to throw things from her high chair and then she says "uh oh!" except she hasn't quite got the intonation right yet so it sounds more like "ah ah!" ala The Count from Sesame Street.

Teia loves going outside and loves the playground. Today when we arrived at the playground she started bellowing loudly to announce to all her arrival!!! I guess she just wanted to make sure that I didn't change my mind and put her back in her car seat.

Her fiesty and determined spirit extends to eating. If Teia doesn't like what is offered she will look you in the eye as she tosses it off her tray, always to the wall side. I guess she likes the splattering, artistic effect. She has also decided that she will not be fed. She will be the one to do the feeding. Only problem is she isn't coordinated enough yet to get food into her mouth by spoon. Well sometimes she manages but alot of the time the food ends up everywhere else. She also dislikes bibs and will tug and tug at them with her face turning red while she grunts until the velcro releases its grasp under her massive power. So we started putting her in long sleeved bibs but she upped the ante and now has the strength to pull those off too and wiggle her little arms out so she can happily mess up her clothes again.

She has quite the sense of humour. She will put her spoon in her mouth, holding it between her teeth until she gets a laugh or two, at which point she'll burst out laughing and drop the spoon out of her mouth. I caught her pulling tongues at herself in the car mirror just this morning. I am trying to get some video of her antics but both of our children seem to stop whatever they are doing as soon as they see the camera. Kai is starting to enjoy showing off so we can use that to our benefit a little to get a few vids but as soon as Teia sees anything electronic and expensive she stops whatever she is doing and lunges. What is it about babies and electronic devices? I have no idea why baby toys are so brightly coloured. They clearly love things in tones of black and silver.

Despite all her fiestiness she is a sweet little soul, full of kisses and cuddles. She loves to hold hands while she swings beside me on our backyard swing set and she still can't get enough of that brother of hers.

Speaking of the little man, he has just finished his first two weeks full-time at preschool (minus 1 day off due to illness) and he is doing great! Every morning he gets up, eats his breakfast, packs his snack box, brushes his teeth and heads off to school. This week he got to be the "star of the day" which meant he had special jobs to do all morning long and did show and tell at circle time.

Kai is still working on his developing engineering skills. Lately he likes to balance his toy stroller on various high places within our house. The other day he was trying to get it on one of the dining room chairs but the wheelbase was too long. I turned away for a few moments and when I turned back Kai was gone but the stroller was carefully positioned on the chair like this:

Kai is also working on his second career, as a singer. He sings all day long these days. Some of his numbers include classics like "on top of spaghetti" and "when you're happy and you know it" but he is also working on some originals too as well as teaching us some he learns at school! Video to come!

Our 18s

I am not sure why the formatting for this post is like this. To be honest I'm too tired to try and fix it. Greg posted on here last...I'll blame him.

Yesterday Greg blogged about his birthday where he made the best of it despite having 2 sick kiddos to obstruct (notice I did not say ruin) his plans for his birthday. They were merely obstructed and modified. I modified my plans for today too. I had planned to ride a metric century to meet some new peeps and check out some new roads but persistent sickness at our house prevented that today too. Oh well.

Yesterday our "18s" Greg and Teia (Kai and I are the "27s"), celebrated Greg's birthday and Teia's 11 month birthday. It has become a tradition for me to blog about her on her month "birthdays" so I didn't want to miss this one, the last before the BIG 1.0 So here she is with her Daddy in all her runny-nosed glory turning 11 months old the same day Daddy turned the big 3-7.

I love this shot, even if she is smeared in snot. I can't get enough of those cheeks :-)

The little one has been busy since my 10 month post. She has taken some steps but she continues to use bouncing as one of her main forms of getting around, in addition to crawling and walking everywhere holding onto someone's hand. I am constantly amazed at how confident she is about movement despite being so little. The other day she climbed up onto Kai's trampoline all by herself, crawled over to the handle and pulled up on it and then proceeded to jump. Her little feet didn't actually leave the tramp but she gave it all she had! Any time she finds anything bouncy: a bed, even a pillow, she tries to jump for all she's worth.

Teia has also started giving kisses: big, sloppy, open mouthed baby kisses. Because Kai imitates everything Teia does, he has also started giving his kisses with a big open mouth. It is a little more frightening when a 3 year old comes at you with a big ol' open mouth full of 20 sharp little teeth! But when T does it, it is pretty cute. She likes to try and kiss other kids too. Some of them like it, others not so much.
Teia has earned another nickname too: Teia the Tornado. If you visited our house, you'd know why. She is into everything. She looks innocent enough in this photo but after she smiled sweetly at the camera she emptied the contents of the kitchen all over the hallway floor. Then she moved on to the real kitchen where she emptied anything should could find onto the floor there too. Nothing is safe from Teia the Tornado.

Teia really does not like being sick. She is one of the grumpiest sick people you can meet. Which is really different for her b/c she is a truly jolly little person. So to distract her from her unhappiness yesterday we took her apple picking and to her first pumpkin patch. She thought the pumpkins were pretty neat. I am just learning to use my fancy new camera but I love the pic below and can't wait to get some great photos of the kiddos this fall. Happy 11 months Teia Bean...can't believe you will be 1 so soon!

Birthday Boy (er, Man)

Today was my 37th birthday. We originally had grand plans of hitting apple picking super-early, getting home for Teia's morning nap, then letting me scoot out for a long mtn bike ride/cafe stop. Unfortunately, as the below picture illustrates, our kidlets weren't feeling super-chipper, even for their old man's birthday:

Nevertheless, we did our best to turn lemons into lemonade and hit the apple farm almost 2 hours after we planned - which coincided with the rest of Metro Boston deciding to hit the exact same apple farm at the exact same time. It wasn't super bad, actually... or maybe we're just used to the crowds these days. Teia, who had refused to anything other than scream for her life when we tried an earlier nap, snoozed on the car trip out so Louise & Kai got the required dose of apple-cider donuts while I played with Louise's new camera (which provided today's pictures)

Apple picking was a hit - Kai & Teia seemed to forget their colds while we were out getting our peck filled. (not too often in our society one can say "get your peck filled" without questionign glances or stink eyes so enjoy it while you can!) Both enjoyed their apple treats and Kai did good work before deciding to practice for his Kids race next weekend w/ wind sprints up & down the tree path, while Teia held court in the pumpkin patch.

After a quiet drive home, Kai & Teia remembered they were sick and let us know it something fierce. We got Kai down for his rest w/o too much incident, but Teia was having none of it. I was finally able to squeeze out for a short, sweet mtn bike ride at some nearby trails then we had take-out Chinese and a very fancy cake to fill everyone up. Deeeelish!

Most photo's are courtesy of Louise. After nearly throwing our pocket camera off a cliff a couple times due to its time delay during unspeakably cute but ridiculously short-lived

scenes w/ the younglin's, we got a Nikon D3000, an entry-level SLR (which is a fancy name for "a nicer camera than a pocket camera"). Its pretty cool and makes a very satisfying, realistic "ka-cheww" sound when you take a picture (as opposed to the sterile 'bip' or 'beep' that accompanies most pocket cams)

First Steps!!!

There are some milestones in a baby's life that are bigger than others, or at least seem to garner all the attention, like first words and first steps. So we thought we'd do a quick post to let the proud grandparents in on our littlest one's latest accomplishment. We have no photos or video unfortunately but I'm sure we'll have lots of chances in the upcoming weeks.

Teia took her first official steps this weekend! Or rather, her first step, several times. She's been half-stepping for a few days now (that is our official term for taking one step with one leg but then falling when attempting to move the other leg). But over the past weekend she has managed to get each leg going and take a real step before she either falls or decides that is far enough and lowers herself to the ground. She is pretty determined. During one of our walks today while I held one hand, she deliberately extracted her little hand from mine so she could take a step on her own. We're very proud of our little Peach! And we think she has her brother to thank for her precociousness. She is really, really motivated to keep up!

From the Beach to the Orchard

Suddenly its Fall in Massachusetts. We've gone from feeling like we're living in a hot, muggy steam room to feeling pleasantly cool. Who knows if it'll last but for today we enjoyed it. Fall is my favorite season in Massachusetts. Truth be told, it's probably my favorite season no matter where I am, but in New England Fall is particularly nice. Its usually quite warm and sunny, the fall colours are amazing and we live close to lots of fruit picking farms. So just days after celebrating summer at the beach, today we tried out a new farm for apple and peach picking. Turns out they had lots of child friendly activities as well as fruit picking. Kai decided to summit Hay Mountain after successfully navigating a tricky hay maze complete with many hazards like other discombobulated Hay Mountain explorers.

After safely jumping and sliding all the way down Hay Mountain we took to the orchard with our peck and bushel in hand. Picking peaches was easy and fun and I managed to find the best peach in the orchard, hanging invitingly from a branch. It was big and juicy and just a little bit warm from the sun. I shared it with my family and Teia and Kai savored it like it was fine chocolate. In fact, when it was all gone Teia (who is obviously very smart) crawled right over to our bushel of peaches and immediately put her little mouth on the delicious fuzzy orange balls. Several of our peaches have a little tiny imprint of two little tiny teeth!

Here she is saying "please mom, can I have another yummy peach?" How can a parent say no? Apparently we can't because she ended the outing with a mouthful of peach ice cream!!! Our little Peach certainly loves peaches!

Kai did his share of orchard fruit eating as well. Why pick when you can sit in the sun and eat? His fruit pickin' work ethic sure ain't what it was last season!

A Perfect Beach Day

One of the advantages of having a hubby in grad school is that he can take random "weekend" days in the middle of the week. It almost makes up for the fact that he works til midnight 7 days a week. Going to the beach on a weekday is almost a necessity in Massachusetts. One of the perils of living in the GBA with a gazillion other people is that they all want to go to the beach too, and most of them want to go on Saturday or Sunday. So in addition to the 25 bucks you'll pay for parking on the weekend, there is a chance that there won't be any parking. And who wants to drive 2 kids 40 miles only to discover that they can't go to the beach after all?

But today was Wednesday and it was scorching hot yet again. So we packed up the trusty Sienna and headed out to investigate Wingaersheek Beach. We'd heard it was perfect for little'uns and we weren't disappointed. Parking was a mere 10 bucks b/c of a dangerous rip tide. But the tide was low and we had plenty of hard sand, tide pools and warm shallow water b/tw us and any dangerous water. We had much less protection from the seagulls. I think parking should be $5 in lieu of those creatures!

Here are the kidlets playing in the mud. As you can see Teia was a BIG fan! She loved all the room to crawl and toddle and Kai loved the running room. We discovered that if we ran really fast in the shallow waters we could almost catch some fish! Kai also had a great time using mommy has a human surfboard. He thought it was fun to lie on top of me and get knocked around a little by the teeny, tiny, little kid perfect waves. Too bad we had put the camera safely back in the backpack by that time :-( Once the tide started coming in and the waves got a bit bigger Kai did some wave jumping that he couldn't get enough of.

Teia was pretty fearless in the water (I uploaded some fun videos but for some reason they are not working on blogger right now :-( so you'll have to take my word for it). It was a big day for her. She got to eat (or rather suck on) her first french fry as well as dine on mouthfuls of mud! Kai was pretty mesmerized by the incoming tide. He stopped his running to study the incoming waters and you could just tell that he was wondering what the heck was going on. It is so fun to get to explain stuff to him these days. All in all it was a fabulous way to end the summer. Both boys will be back in class in a few short days and before we know it it we'll be celebrating the 18ths.