It’s Mother’s Day.

I’ll do what I want.

(First of all, you have to know that I’ve watched this video like a billion times in the past few days and I think it gets funnier every time. You should probably watch it too.)

Last night, the girls took forever to fall asleep. I stupidly assumed this meant that they’d sleep in a bit this morning, and that I’d have time to get up and dressed and coffeed before rousing them. And you know what they say happens when you assume something- you just end up with 3 children awake in your bed at 6am.

But when they come armed with gifts and cards and snuggles, how can you refuse the cute?

Well, the older two came with snuggles. The little one was her new typically ornery self. Fiona made me like a dozen cards, all full of hearts and flowers and drawings of the two of us, and my personal favorite- the drawing of the beach house in the OBX. Look at it- it’s got the purple house we stayed in last year, and then the pool, and then the steps to the beach, and then the sand and then the water. Ahhhhhhh, the beach. I miss you.

I mean, look at that! Her drawing from memory compared to google maps’ aerial view of the property. Pretty damn good, I’d say.

So after the gift-giving, we all got dressed up warmly and headed out to this month’s race, a Mother’s Day 5k.

After the obligatory “stand here next to Mama and look over at Daddy real quick for a second” pre-race photo op, I was off and the kiddos headed over to hit one of the two bouncy houses. (This was no tiny little race, they had some serious entertainment going on.)

The race itself was nice, a bit chilly to start but I was so glad it wasn’t any warmer because as soon as I got moving I warmed up quite significantly. The first bit was on the road, and actually covered a small of amount of road I remember from my half back in February. What a difference a few months makes. The second half of the run went down onto some trails and man, it got hilly. Not anything too too huge, but just lots of small ups and downs. Made for a challenging race, but a good one for sure. I ended up doing the whole thing with one of the women I know from our boot camp workouts, and it was awesome that she didn’t mind keeping my snail’s pace. Always nice to have company. I guarantee I would have walked way more of those hills if I didn’t have somebody running alongside me. Had enough left at the end for a strong sprint to the finish, and we finished solidly in the middle of the pack. I was 329 out of 611 total runners in the 5k, and only 66th out of the 278 in my age group. So hey, I’d say that’s a job well done.

Then we hung around and had snacks (though I still cannot get used to the lack of BAGELS at races here. I feel like every race I’ve ever done back home they just have bags and bags of bagels at the finish lines and they NEVER have bagels here! There was a Tim Horton’s tent that was giving out coffee and muffins, but the line was ridiculously long and by the time I got to the table they had no more muffins to hand out and I was crushed.) and played in the bouncy houses some more, and then we got to watch the kid’s race. They did a 50-yard dash, and Fiona decided to participate. It was exactly as cute as it sounds.

So proud of my little finisher.

 

Five down!