Happy 38th Birthday, Michael!!! (can't believe you're that old!)

Today is Dan's brother, Mike's birthday. Happy Birthday Mike!!!! He's really only 33 by the way. :) Mike, Kasey and Evan drove up for the weekend and we had lots of fun. Maddy and Mal really enjoyed playing with baby Evan...he's soooo cute!!! Kasey and I wanted to get a few shots of the cousins together. As you can see my first attempt didn't turn out so well considering Mallory's finger is seriously half-way up her nose!!!

(can anyone tell me why everything is underlined??? Below it went back to normal...wierd)

Ahhh this is much better

Saturday morning Madison had a soccer game and I did another triathlon. I'll spare you all the boring details and times, but I did much better on the swim (2 minutes faster) and improved my overall time by about 5 minutes! It was tons of fun. Here's a pic of me and my Dad...he's my biggest fan!

My first triathlon

Yesterday I completed my 1st ever triathlon! It was terrifying and exciting both. Actually the swim was the terrifying part for me. I trained for it, but swimming in a reservoir with hundreds of other people vs. swimming in a clear pool by myself are completely different! Not long into the swim I had a guy literally swim onto my back which of course forced me under right as I was taking a breath. I inhaled quite a bit of water into my lungs. It was definitely a mind over matter thing. I kept saying I can do this, I can do this, I can do this over and over! It's just freaky having people kicking and grabbing you as you are trying to swim. I finished the 500 m swim in 14:00 minutes, not great, but I survived! Oh and did I mention it was 60 degrees out???? After the swim I ran into the transition area to where my bike was. Your time doesn't stop during this so I tried to keep that in mind as I was drying off and putting on my socks, shoes, shirt and helmet. Then you have to run your bike to the beginning of the bike course. I felt like I went as fast as I could, but my transition time was around 3:00 minutes. (not great)

The bike course was 10 miles and I probably should have trained a bit more on a hilly course b/c there were quite a few during the race. Also to make things a little more challenging was that the road was wet and slippery. They kept announcing to take the turns SLOWLY b/c of the road conditions. The bike portion took me 37:00 minutes. Again I headed into the transition area (about 2 minutes) where I took off my helmet and put the bike on its rack and ran out (it seemed like a long way) to the start of the last leg of the race, the 3 mile run.

The run wasn't bad except that the first 1.5 miles were at an incline! Hello, I just swam and biked and now I have to run 1.5 miles uphill?????? Once I made the turn and I knew the next 1.5 miles were downhill I was able to pick up my pace quite a bit. In the picture above I'm just heading out to run and I'm giving Maddy and Mallory high-fives. I was still smiling b/c I couldn't see the hill I was about to run up... The run took me 28:50. The entire race for me took 1 hour and 25 minutes.
Woo-hoo I did it! Maddy and Mallory were my little cheerleaders. It was sweet to hear them screaming "GO MOM,GO!!!!" throughout the race. My parents were there and so was Dan and his parents. It was nice to have a cheering section!
It was actually a lot of fun (minus the swim) and I'm thinking of doing an all girl tri next Saturday with my cousin. It's like giving birth...you forget the pain over time and consider another one. Ha!

Little Laughlin

The time has finally come for little Mallory to finally play soccer! The poor thing has sat on the sidelines of way too many soccer games and practices and now she's finally out on the field. Tonight was the first practice and of course Daddy's coaching. Our weeks look something like this: Mon. = Maddy's practice Tues.= Mallory's practice Wed.= Maddy's practice Thurs.= Mallory's practice Both have games on Saturday's. (Dan's coaching both girls)Could she be any cuter?????

In other news (and probably the reason I've been a non blogger recently) is that my triathlon is this Saturday morning. It's a 5oo m swim (the part I'm the most nervous about), 10 mile bike ride and 3 mile run. I'm excited for it, but also excited for it to be over. ;) Life has kinda revolved around my training and I feel like all I do is swim, bike, run or just swim and sometimes bike and run, occasionally swim and bike....Ugh! Anyhoo, I'll post some pics of the race on Saturday or Sunday.

A day of firsts...

Today was Maddy's first day of 2nd grade. She loved it and after school told me she gives her teacher a 14 out of 14! Ha! I asked her what she liked best about her teacher and Maddy said, "her voice." Hmmmm...well ok. Poor Mal was very sad to see her sister go to school and be gone all day she cried for quite a while after we dropped Maddy off. Madison took me aside before school and whispered that I should do something special with Mal since she was so upset. I thought that was sweet. Isn't she getting big? :(So Mal has asked me repeatedly for about a month now to take her training wheels off her bike. I've been putting it off, but decided to give it a try today, hoping it would distract her from missing Maddy so much. No joke...I took them off, gave her a long speech about not getting discouraged, it taking lots of practice, not riding by herself for at least few days, yadda, yadda, yadda... She gets on the bike and takes off down the road totally on her own!!!!!! It was so funny! She kept yelling to anyone who was in their front yard, "Hi! Look at me. I'm riding my bike without my training wheels!!!!!!" Here she is proudly sitting on her bike w/out training wheels. I should have taken one of her actually riding it, but we were late to pick Maddy up for school. :) WAY TO GO MALLORY PAIGE!

Camping at Whitewater State Park

So I'm finally blogging about our camping trip last weekend. We had a great time despite our wet start! When we arrived at our campsite it was raining so hard we didn't even want to get out of the cars. Dan came up with the idea of backing out vehicles up against each other, opening the trunks and hanging our tarps over them creating a "tent" for us to sit under and allowing us and the girls to at least get out of the car!!!Are we having fun wet...I mean yet?

Hanging out under the tarps, snacking and praying we can set our tents up so we don't have to sleep in our cars all night. The rain did eventually let up allowing us to set the tents up before another torrential downpour that lasted until about 4-5am!!! The girls slept great despite the rain, but when we woke up in the morning to several inches of rain in the bottom of the tent and ALL our bedding was wet. :(

After the flood: we awoke to a beautiful sun-shiny day and hung everything out to dry on our makeshift clothes line.

Drying our out tents

This was a beautiful overlook where we had a picnic lunch

Lynne and I reading our Twilight books

Mud pies...need I say more?

Mallory with bed-head

Lynne making chocolate chip pancakes. Mmmm they were good!

Scrambled eggs anyone?

We had a ton of fun canoeing. The water was pretty fast from all the rain, but we are pretty experienced canoers (is that a word?) and cracked up at everyone else crashing and flipping out of their canoes.

Mal with Grandma and Grandpa L.

This was our last hoorah before school starts on Wednesday. :( So glad we went!!! (despite the rain)