Well, that's weird ...

As it turns out, blogs do not actually write themselves.

When I was little I used to think turning on the cruise control meant the car totally drove itself. I thought it was weird! I mean, how does the car know where we're going? But, I was a kid and there was tons of stuff I didn't know so I never asked about it - I didn't want to look stupid! Eventually I figured it out, of course.

Anyway. I'm going to try to write posts again.

Six!

Look at our boy - he turned 6 this week!! Can you believe it? I was going to pick a couple of my favorite pictures to show how he's grown but a couple turned into like 40 or some crazy amount like that. Anyway, I decided to make a little video of them instead of posting each picture. (Don't read too much into the music - we just picked Eli's favorite song.)

Edited to add: OK, so I guess there's nothing at all to read into... apparently YouTube/REM/the powers that be took offense at me using Night Swimming on this little video of Eli so they disabled the audio on it. So be it. Still cute pictures of Eli :-)

Success!

I'm sure by now you've realized that we're well into 2011 and the holidays are a dream of the past but I still wanted to post a quick little wrap-up with some fun pictures.

I honestly think this was one of the most fun holiday seasons we've ever had! I'm not sure what tipped the scales but I hope for many repeat performances in the years to come. We definitely packed it all in and tried our best to keep the stress to a minimum.

We survived many big snow falls/storms, celebrated a big birthday (my 40th!), made gingerbread houses, picked out/bought/wrapped all our gifts, baked cookies (but skipped the truffles this year), got together with friends old & new, saw Santa, celebrated with both of our families and had just the best time ever!! And in between all that Eli had his first visit from the Tooth Fairy, we got the exciting new the Troy's brother and his wife are expecting their first baby (a boy!!), Eli had his Festival of Lights at school, Henry went to his first Vikings game (thanks for the tickets Curt!), Henry went to his first Timberwolves game, all of the boys went ice fishing for the first time courtesy of Uncle Tyler, there was sledding/tubing/snow fort building, Troy went to the historic Vikings game that was played in the new Gopher FB stadium during a blizzard (thanks again to Curt!) and Henry started basketball again and this year he's playing for the Hawkeyes!

We had so much fun!

Look how cute! Here's Eli with his teacher, Mrs Fox, at his Festival of Lights. Eli totally loved all of the other holidays that he learned about in school - Hanukkah, Diwali, Christmas, and Ramadan. I overheard him and his friend Teshe "arguing" about which of them celebrates Hanukkah better. Nice.

The classic first missing tooth picture.

Christmas Eve at Uncles Wade and Aunt Tanya's house - wearing their new jackets... aka button down shirts. We're pretty fancy, ya know.

All the Tuttle grandkids with Grandma Becky at Aunt Heid's house.

Troy & Henry at the Vikings game - little did they know this would be the last game played in the dome this year thanks to the roof collapse.

Henry's first fish! They had so much fun ice fishing. Eli caught a fish too so total success!

Bring on 2011.

A Sapless Thanksgiving Post

I love Thanksgiving. But man, it's hard not to get all sappy when I think about all there is to be thankful for. The boys are dreams, truly! And Troy is just plain dreamy. (he's going to love that I wrote that) So instead of getting teary-eyed and mushy I'm going to post funny pictures of H&E. You're welcome.

Now, bring on the turkey neck! Joke. No one should eat that - for any reason. Seriously, why do they include that in the turkey? While they are funny and extremely entertaining, they are definitely gross.

Happy Thanksgiving!

Blue Man Group

I love hair cut day. I think the boys just look so cute with their hair all cut and gelled and colored. I know I'm completely biased but really, aren't they super cute kids?

In other news - the official race results were posted this week and Troy finished 42nd out of 192 people in his 10k. Isn't that awesome? I think so. He thinks it's just "OK." Whatever. He changed his tune a bit when we saw that I placed like 126th out of 193 people. Yeah - not as awesome. That's cool though. It was still fun.

One last thing - Eli officially got his cast off 100% yesterday. His humerus is healing well with lots of new, strong bone growing over & around the break. Now it's more important that he work on his range of motion instead of protecting the bone. He's doing great and I think he's really happy to be rid of Big Red for good!

Boo!

I feel like we've been celebrating Halloween for weeks now. Oh wait, we have been. I think this has been the longest ever Halloween season. I'm (secretly) glad it's over. Now we can get on to the business of eating candy, which I much prefer over giving candy to strangers ;-)

Here's how the Halloween madness in the Schally household went:

Pumpkin carving - you'll notice that we're in shorts and t-shirts. This should have been our first clue the it was probably too hot for the pumpkins to survive. But, it was a great excuse to make cookies and hang out outside with the boys. Eli's pumpkin is Frankenstein and Henry's is the ghost. I'm sorry to report that within 3 days these pumpkins had collapsed on themselves and were completely moldy. It was kinda sad but mostly disgusting.

The next big event was their good friend Teshe's birthday party. It was a costume party and the kids all had a great time playing scary games, eating creepy food and hanging out in the spooky basement. Here are the boys before the party. Eli is Iron Man 2 and Henry is a skeleton. Eli almost didn't make it to the party - this was the day he got the pins taken out of his arm and he was pretty traumatized by that. But, he pulled it together at the last minute and headed out.

Troy and I were lucky enough to get to dress up again this year for a costume party. Our costume choices are always a hot topic in our house - discussions and brain storming sessions that last for days. I'm not sure how creative we ended up being this year but it was fun nonetheless. Troy went with a tried and true favorite - the ever-annoying mime. And I decided on the wicked step-mother/witch handing out poison apples from Snow White. We knew that our party hostess was going to be Snow White and thought this was be funny.

And last but certainly not least was the big day! The boys spent the night before with Uncle Wade & Aunt Tanya - they carved a new pumpkin and watched a couple of Halloween shows. Just in general had a ton of fun. And on Halloween we had our neighbors over for dinner and then all the kids went out trick-or-treating together. I loved this. This is why we moved. I love that we have families to hang out with, that our kids have friends right next door and up the street. Love it! And the kids had such a great time. They always have fun trick-or-treating but this year was more than that. Once they'd filled their buckets and made it around the neighborhood Troy brought them home (and the other kids headed home too). But when they got home Henry dumped his bucket out and proudly declared that he was going back out for more!! Eli, on the other hand, was done and already in his jammies. I think the dads had fun too - evidenced by the red cups (actually they were pink) carried throughout the neighborhood. I heard though that there needs to be some cup modification for next year. I guess they sloshed around a bit too much in their strollers. It didn't seem to stop them though.

Here are our little monsters in their costumes. Eli is a werewolf - because all Halloween costumes are supposed to be scary so he couldn't wear the Iron Man 2 costume. Plus, this one fit without his cast! And Henry is (again) a skeleton. Both were really good costumes. Henry's actually kinda freaked me out though.

Hope you all had as happy a Halloween as we did.

The Three Bears

You probably thought this was going to be a cute Halloween post...

About a month & a half ago Troy started talking about signing our family up for a race. He was pretty much the only one who thought that was a good idea. But, after some convincing and cajoling, Henry and I agreed. Eli, like the stubborn little person he is, stood his ground and emphatically said "NO!" With that, we signed up for a "Papa Bear, Mama Bear, Baby Bear" race, which means Troy was going to run a 10k (6.2 miles), I was going to run a 5k (3.1 miles) and Henry was going to run a 1k (0.6 miles).

Now, if you know me, you know that I'm not a runner. Sure, I'm athletic and did sports in high school but cross country was not one of them. I mostly stuck to the 100 and 200 meter distances. And while I do run on the treadmill for exercise, I by no means enjoy it. Troy, on the other hand, is a runner - always has been always will be. He runs a long way really fast. Henry likes to run and he's fast but it's mostly around the yard or to play tag with his buddies so this was going to be his first try running a race. So, this race has been a big topic of conversation in our house since we registered. Mostly me complaining or Henry deciding to not run it. I'm not sure I'd say it brought us closer as a family. <--- just kidding ;-)

Troy and I both did some training - mostly on the treadmill but we did venture outside for a run or two before the race. And we measured out a 1k route around our neighborhood for Henry so he could train too. Troy took him on a couple of runs, which went really well - they ran pretty fast. But Henry wasn't super interested in the training thing and regularly said no when we asked him to go. Oh well - we knew he could do it.

We knew there were going to be a couple of obstacles on race day - the fact that it was trail running and the fact that it was probably going to be pretty cold. Turns out we were right on both counts. The trails weren't in great shape so that made it difficult. And, it was under 40F during the 10k and the start of the 5k. When you're running that's not bad but when you're the people standing around waiting it's pretty cold.

Here's our Baby Bear when we got there. Henry only agreed to do the race on one condition - that he could wear a sweatband! And he really wanted it to be red, white and blue stripes. I went to every store I could think of but no one had them in stock. So I ended up with this NBA one - which has all the colors on it, just not striped. I got another one too that was just red and white. He loves the sweatbands and wears them around the house a lot. He's really looking forward to wearing them to basketball practice too because that's what the professionals wear.

Here's Papa Bear finishing is 10k. Troy did a terrific job - finishing a little over 44 minutes. His goal was 47 minutes. We were really proud of him! To run that much faster on a crappy trail with mud, rocks, hills, water and (most of all!) piles of horse crap is amazing!!

Papa Bear and Baby Bear after the 10k.

Mama Bear and Baby Bear before the 5k started.

Mama Bear finishing the 5k. The race wasn't super great for me. I thought the trail was difficult to run and got a side cramp toward the middle of mile 2 that I had to deal with. And while I secretly was hoping to finish closer to 30 minutes I knew realistically I'd probably finish in 34-36 minutes. Anyway, I finished in a little over 33 minutes. I'm happy with that. I know to the runners out there that's super slow but for me, it was decent.

Here's our boy - happily (and maybe a little anxiously) awaiting the start of his race. He totally rocked that sweatband! But you'll notice it's a different sweatband than he arrived with. Sometime during my 5k he lost the NBA one so I'm really glad that I brought this one along too. It turned out that this really wasn't a 1k race. They just set up cones for a little course around the finish line area. It was maybe a 0.5k, maybe. Plus it was crowded and they were running on grass. It was terribly unorganized - not the experience I was hoping for for him.

That ketchup lady kept getting in the way of my picture. Geez!

Here's Henry rounding the first turn. He was running really fast and trying to pass these little kids in costume. Right after I took this picture he tried to go around them by going off the course a bit up on the hill and tripped and fell. He just looked up and started to cry - poor little monkey. But we got him up and dusted him off and even though he didn't want to finish I ran the rest with him.

Here we are at the finish line - you can see how not happy he is to be finishing. But they handed out candy and a ribbon to all the kids, which helped some. Troy also (unbeknownst to Henry) slipped a medal around his neck that we had brought for him. Henry was really hoping he'd get a medal but this race wasn't handing them out except to the winners of the 10k and 5k. So I ran out to a trophy store and bought one. That medal turned the experience around for him. He was so happy and proud!

You know what? It was really fun. Not necessarily the running part (for me or Henry) but the whole experience of having a shared goal to work toward, talk about, train for. Spending the morning together cheering each other on. Celebrating our personal victories together. And I know I'll regret this but I think this is something we could do again as a family. And maybe next time Eli might be willing to try too. And maybe next time we can pick a race where we don't need winter coats to keep warm...