Philip and Jaime Connor

Over the weekend, I ran my first half marathon. I knew I was going to be slow, but my goal was to run the whole thing and I did it and it was very cool and fulfilling to make a big goal like that and then accomplish it. Here is a breakdown of the race including some highlights and some lowlights. 9:30 pm Saturday I went to bed, but was unfortunately kept up for half the night dealing with little people issues, courtesy of Joslyn and Caleb. Not necessarily the auspicious beginning for which I had hoped. 4:30 am Sunday I woke up to my alarm and stumbled out of bed. I have never claimed to be a morning person, but thought I was pretty lucid considering. I had a bowl of frosted mini wheats, got dressed and most importantly fed Chase! Phil got me out the door at about 10 minutes past five and I took off. 5:10-5:55 am was spent driving. I knew the way, I had been sure to drive there on Friday. I didn't have any trouble until I got close and they started closing roads due to the r...

Over the weekend our family flew over to the neighboring island of Kauai so that I could run the half marathon there. The flight was great and took us only about 25 minutes from takeoff to landing. Caleb was so excited to go "bye bye na airpane" and was so cute with his little backpack and blanket. We flew out of Honolulu on Thursday evening and arrived in Kauai at about 6:30. We picked up our cars, yes you read that right, cars as in two of them. It turns out that it is cheaper to rent two economy cars than it is to rent one mini van. By about half. Go figure. Anyway, we picked up our cars and drove to the hotel where we received our first unpleasant surprise. You see when I booked the hotel, they gave me the impression that it was in the same town as the marathon, but it wasn't. Hmmm, you'll hear more about the race later, as it will receive it's very own post. The second of our nasty surprises came when I was checking in and asked for a playpen for Chas...

Phil has discovered a new fun thing to do with our kids. Since we love to go out hiking he thought this might be something to motivate the kids to keep going when they get tired. It is called geocaching. It is kind of like a treasure hunt because you go out with coordinates, and then using your GPS system, you find a cache. It is usually a box of some kind with different objects in it. Once you find the box, you take something out, and leave something behind for the next person. There is a web site that tells you all the different coordinates and they can be out in the wilderness, or even just around town. Phil, Joslyn, and Caleb went on a trial run to a cache close to our house, and then we decided to go on a hike to find a cache by a waterfall here on the island. The kids were super excited and were such troopers. Unfortunately, while we were hiking, Phil was still trying to figure out all the settings on his GPS and he messed up the coordinates so we didn't know where to g...