The weather couldn’t have been more perfect for the half marathon on Saturday!  Last year’s half marathon in Lowell, MA was in rain and snow.  We finished the race, grabbed food from the food tent, bundled up and got to the car as fast as we possibly could.  This year we enjoyed hanging out in the sunshine and warmth of a spectacular fall afternoon!

And there were more friends involved this year which always makes things extra-fun.  Last year and this year we ran with Brett and Jenna (on the right). We also got to run and hang out with our friends Jess and Pat from Connecticut this year.  One of our recent church plants ~ Valley Church ~ also had both half marathon runners and a relay team that completed the full marathon, so it was fun to see them there as well.

The big bummer of the day, though, was that Robert ended up not running. His plantar fascitis had not healed enough to allow him to run long distances, and to top it off he pulled his back out on Monday of last week while on the elliptical machine at the gym.  Any notions he had of attempting to run on Saturday were completely dashed at that point, as he could hardly get himself out of the gym and into his truck to come home. He spent the rest of the week on naproxen sodium and a heating pad….

…which meant that he also spent the two hours we all spent running entertaining all of the children.  But as you can see from the photos, he was a super good sport about the whole thing, despite his discouragement over being injured and not being able to join in the “fun” of running.  He took them to watch the start of the race, to Starbucks for hot chocolate and some “electronic” time (hence the downward focused eyes while sitting on the walk outside of Starbucks), then to the park to meet up with the rest of us after the race.

The night before, our family stayed in a hotel just outside of the city.  We purposely reserved one with a pool, so that it would be a mini-vacation for the kids.  When we arrived (3 hours later than planned due to holiday weekend traffic), we discovered that our “two queen beds” had turned into “one king” that barely fit within the parameters of the room.  Evidently, the small print mentioned that the requested number of beds was NOT guaranteed, and we also happened to choose the weekend of some middle school soccer tournament. So, not only did we not get two beds, but there were hundreds of middle-schoolers running up and down the hallways and hanging out in the lobby!  We waited over three hours for our two rollaway beds, and then had to rearrange all of the room furniture (i.e. stuff as much of it as you can into the closet or between the king sized bed and the wall) and sacrifice our down comforter to make Cooper semi-comfortable on the floor.

We were all so cramped and on top of each other!  Then the arguing over the remote control began, and I decided once again that NOT having cable television at home is SUCH a good decision ~ they can already find enough to argue about.  Why add more opportunity?

And the whole scenario began to remind me of something Cooper used to say when he was little. He absolutely LOVED staying in hotels.  I mean, ice machines, vending machine, watching TV in bed, jumping from bed to bed, swimming pools, hot tubs ~ what’s not to like? But, he couldn’t quite pronounce “hotel” correctly and so, if we were going out of town or traveling to Texas, he would always ask:

Well, we adopted that pronunciation ourselves, because as you can clearly see from our most recent experience, it is a very accurate description, and even more so now as our kids are nearly as big as we are – invading our once personal space continually – and have opinions about what to watch on TV: 

Boys: ESPN

Girl: Animal Planet

Parents: Fox News