First 5K!

I completed my first 5K this morning. I have been "training" for a few months, but this was derailed a few weeks ago when I caught a nasty cold which has been lingering. But, I decided to run this morning anyways. It was 36 degrees outside when I woke up (brrrrr!) but I think it was near 50 by the time the race started. I ran with my friend, Danie, who has also been training. We slogged our way through, me hacking up a lung every so often. So I must say I am kind of proud with my 16 min mile pace given all of those limitations. We then had a "girls afternoon" which was wonderful... and tonight I allowed myself to purchase some new pants that fit better (using a slew of coupons, hooray!) I am now down 3 or 4 pant sizes, depending on the cut/style. Rock on :) I had to buy new exercise pants because my current favorites have to be hiked up every 30 seconds while running, not cool at all.

I have also done some serious "life cleaning" this week. Earlier this year, I was cornered into taking on a new role of first year fellow chief. For a lot of reasons, this became ineffective and was leading to a lot of people being very passive aggressive / openly hostile towards me. So let's see...a job I didn't ask to do that is not accomplishing what it was created to do and is causing people to treat me like poo over things I have no control over. No thanks :) I also handed off the last of VA moonlighter scheduling responsibilities to the new chief resident and made the decision to cut down my moonlighting significantly at the hospital that requires me to drive the furthest and stay out of town for the entire weekend. I didn't realize how much stress all of this was causing me...after doing all of that, I started sleeping much, much better and couldn't stop smiling! To further improve life, we also have a part time nanny starting next week who will be home when Nate gets home on the bus, will do some light housecleaning and make dinner. She is a baker by trade and we are just a little excited to have her starting ;) Evenings have been the most stressful part of my day and this will take a lot of the pressure off.

We made a quick trip to Oregon mid September to celebrate DHs dad's 70th birthday party. It was good to see a lot of old friends as well as family. We stayed with some of our good friends, which was an uber excellent decision because they did not even bat an eye when Nate had some pooping issues. The same could not be said if we stayed at other locations...just sayin' ;) Ben did much better on the flight, thus comforting me that it will not always be horrible to fly with him in the future.

We are in the process of doing a second colon clean out for Nate, apparently the first one was not successful. It's a bummer, apparently the next step if this doesn't clean him out is for them to hospitalize him briefly to do the industrial strength version. I'd rather not if we could avoid it. I keep reminding myself that he won't go to college with the problem, so things will get better at some point. Without hope, there is only despair. He is a bit of a pill though...you will ask him if he is clean and he will say yes, but if you ask to check he tries to talk you out of it or will run downstairs to change. This tells us he knows that he is not clean, but why he is fibbing has been hard to determine. I have been working on taking the emotion and shame out of the whole thing, which seems to be helping somewhat with him telling the truth when he is soiled. We will see how it goes. In the past, he has also struggled with saying "sorry" when he has done something wrong or hit somebody, etc. He has made a lot of improvements with this over the last month. He is loving kindergarten and has made some friends. His birthday party is in a couple of weeks and the planning will soon be in full swing.

Less than 4 weeks until WDW and the boys still do not know. I'm a little proud that I have kept the secret this long :)