After getting in bed with Jay last night^**, he grabbed my hand and said:

Jay: Mommy. Can we talk?
Me: For a little bit. I’m tired and need to sleep.
Jay: Can we talk about dinosaurs?

Remind me about this conversation in about 10 years. I’ll miss the easy ones.

*That needs to be on my to-do list. I will want to remember these later, and I never write this stuff down on paper.

**Jay has a difficult time getting to sleep at his prescribed bedtime. I feel for him because I grew up the same way, and sitting in your room in the dark for hours was boring, but never resulted in me actually falling asleep. I’m like that as an adult as well. My body falls asleep naturally around 1-2 am when not living by an alarm. To help Jay, I usually cave and let him get in bed with us because that will result in him falling asleep faster than when left alone, as well as results in me not having to listen to him cry. Mac kicked him out last night before he had fallen asleep, so I decided to get in bed with him.

I have Heather’s RSS feed in my reader — aka dooce.com, and every once in a great while I’ll take a peek, especially for photos. Most of the time, I just hit “mark as read.” So, I’m behind in this about a year, but I found another Paleo testimony. Everybody I personally know — including me — that has done this has had the exact same testimony. I’ve never experienced such a profound change as I have with this. I struggle at times, fall off the wagon, and suffer the consequences^*.

Yup, 2:44am. Time to see if I can once again sleep. My alarm is still going off at 5:30am and that is going to suck.

*My occasional cheating for rice in the form of sushi. Or when my SIL visited and I ate waaaaay too many things with gluten, felt bloated, suffered cravings and endured three days straight with a headache, one day that verged on a puking migraine. I’m convinced that my migraines are triggered by gluten. I’ve not eaten anything with gluten since April 2nd, and not only have I not had a migraine, I’ve not had a headache. I’ve not even once woke up in the morning with my sinuses congested. Both of those used to be daily occurrences for me before I switched to paleo.

I didn’t stay longer than midnight though–navigating the loooong way around to get to our house. People at that time were still arriving for downtown celebrations. I would have stayed, but I had to get up at 5:15am so I could be back downtown at 6:00am to drive to Boulevard Brewery to start our wave of the Brew2Brew.

There isn’t tons to say about this run except that I wish I hadn’t gone to bed past 1:00am, and drank for the game. I downed some caffeine to start and passed on the drinking that started at Boulevard, opting for water and bananas. My run went okay. The temperature hadn’t reached the 90s yet, but it was still hot for my leg. I have been having leg cramping issues recently, and they did surface again for this run, so I did two sessions of walking to prevent it from becoming a charley horse. Once it was done, then I consumed the beer. Freestate feeds you at the end in Liberty. Mac and the kids rendezvoused with me there. Ada ate about half of my plate. I was wearing down with lack of sleep, running, heat and sun exposure. Ada and I split off to run an errand, and then we went home. Taking a cool shower and throwing in a load of laundry for the running clothes were the only two items I partook in before collapsing in bed and taking a nap.

I still feel tired and the back of my pasty white legs hurt where I didn’t even think to apply sunscreen and are now burned.

Tomorrow: THE GAME!!!

One time we had to fix it, it took 5 weeks and three repair visits.

This time we received at first the CE error codes and later the LD ones. I think because the attempts to run it was drawing water into the inner tub, but it was unable to drain it, probably related to the board problems from the initial CE error. Or there is a sock in the pump. Or the shitty pump that has to be replaced many, many times during the lifetime of the washer is shitting out. Again. Either way, we get both errors intermittently at different times.

Given that we will have to likely spend many, many more times fixing this crappily engineered (or cheaply assembled) washer, we decided to just buy new ones.

Oh? The dryer? Yes, it still runs, but it has had the issue where it just turns itself on around 2:00am, drying and beeping and drying and beeping that it is out the door as well. The new dryer hopefully doesn’t have that auto turn on at obscene times of the night feature. The new dryer also has another great feature: It matches the washer. The importance of that is it is designed to stack on top of the washer, should we want that configuration. The 10 year warranty hopefully also means that we won’t have anymore appliance problems for another 10 years and a few days.

The washing machine is being scrapped. I wouldn’t recommend it to anybody given that you are likely going to have to spend way too much time and money fixing it. The dryer is for sale though. The turning itself on feature has happened only four times in the almost 8 years we have owned it, and unplugging it for awhile makes it stop. I even proposed we just replace the washer because I don’t have a current issue with the dryer. We just decided to circumvent appliance repair for awhile, and give us the option of stacking the washer and dryer, and just replace both.

If you know of someone who needs a cheap electric dryer, let me know.

Today I took Ada out with me for a run/walk. We did 3.56 miles, and I even managed to have her run some. Her form is not good, heel striking most of the time. I showed her how to strike mid-foot, but she said that was too hard. The result was that her heels started hurting around the 1.5 mile mark.

The other bad is that we did this out at Clinton, where everything is concrete. It wouldn’t have mattered if Ada had tired of the running first, I would have shortly after. We did scoot over to the side of the path to hit the grass, but big parts of that path are swampy and neither of us had trail shoes on. The dirt out there has a lot of clay in it too, so it is really slippery when you add standing water to the mix.

On the good side, Ada did 3.56 miles with only two small bench breaks! It took us 1 hour and 15 minutes, but she did it! She wants to go out with me again. Maybe by the time we do that 5K together^*, we will get our time down to 1 hour.

I have also made the decision that I do not want to run sidewalks anymore. The next time we go out, I’m taking her to the Riverfront Park trails. I’m going to reserve Clinton recreational paths for walking and biking. I’m sticking to walking for the Northshore trails as well for I am clumsy and they are thick with curves, roots and rocks.

I’m also picking up a — *sigh* — fanny pack. I usually tie my keys on me, but with the Toyota and its big, boxy, smart key, it is too bouncy and takes up too much shoestring to tie it down.Today, I buckled it into my watch, and it constantly banged against my hand which drove me crazy. I can also do about 3 miles without water, taking a big drink before I head out, but with Ada, I took water. That was a pain as well. So, yeah, fanny pack.

*It is a fun run, so a 1:15 time is acceptable.

Tomorrow is going to be a really, really nice day, so I’m going to take Ada out with me. That means tomorrow is probably going to be some light intervals. I’m going to do hills on Monday, and then back to distance on Wednesday and Friday. The next Saturday is St. Patrick’s Day, and I’ll be entertaining both kids while Mac goes out. I probably won’t run that day.

April 1st is the Brew 2 Brew. After that I’m going to start running in my Merrell’s. Be prepared to hear me whine about my calves. June 30th is the Color Run. I need to start participating in more organized runs because it gives me a goal and keeps me focused.

I want to do this so bad. I really hope that they do this next year. I don’t think I’d be prepared for running plus obstacle course plus waves of zombies trying to take me out of the race by August, so either I need to wait until next year or convince Mac that our family needs to take a trip to San Diego in October.

Perhaps I’ll keep C25K around as a tool to start running in my Merrells fulltime, which I’m not going to do until after Brew 2 Brew because OMG, my calves. I don’t know if I have enough time to build up those muscles for Brew 2 Brew.

I have looked at other training plans and haven’t decided on anything. My immediate goal — besides getting faster — is to be able to run for 1.5 hours. I’m halfway there!

Ada is going to do her first run with me: Color Run KC.

Now I need to shower.

I’ve been not so great at pre-planning meals. I’ve utilized my crockpot a little more to make dinner at night while I sleep, but what I have slacked off on is doing bulk cooking on the weekend. Except for today. I made a crustless quiche with kale, artichoke hearts and red bell peppers, mixed together a meatloaf, roasted vegetables and assembled them into a vegetarian enchilada-like casserole, made a big bowl of mashed cauliflower, restocked the hardboiled eggs and put some yogurt in the wave strainer. It uses up a big chunk of a weekend afternoon, but I’m extremely happy during the week when all I have to do take something out of the fridge and put it in the oven to cook or re-warm. There is leftover spinach from the meatloaf^* and casserole to throw together a salad. I also bought blueberries, strawberries and bananas. I should be good until Friday since Mac gets the privilege of making dinner on Wednesdays and Thursdays.

*I bulk my meatloaf up with vegetables and use no grains. This one I used chopped, fresh spinach and would have grated some carrots had I not saved this task for last and been really tired of meal prep/cleanup. I’m going to make up to Mac for putting green stuff in the meat by cooking it with bacon on top.

I wasn’t sure I was going to yet considering I just started to be able to bend my knee normally again. I really wanted to try though. I did C25K Week 4, which I felt would be a pretty easy interval try: 3 min running, 90sec walk, 5 min running, 2.5 min walk, repeat. There was only 16 minutes of running, but hey, I could really, really feel that muscle. I can still feel it now.

I could also feel the ground, which was very cool. And nothing else hurt during my running time. The grip on the shoes is fabulous. I love just walking around in them, and for that alone, I want to pick up another pair to replace my old mary jane’s I pad around in during the summer.

As for running, my next one will be with my Sauconys. The one after that with the Merrells. Due to the fact that my normal walking style is to supinate and the fact that I don’t wear shoes inside and wear pretty minimal shoes all summer, I think I’m a good candidate to go with these. I’m taking it cautiously, though. I’ve never been injured due to running since I wised up on the shoes and running form, and I’d like to keep it that way.

*See title.