August Self Portrait

Some months I have a tough time deciding what to do for my self portrait.  Not this month.  It had to be running.  I did A LOT of running this month.  Here's me and my faithful running buddy on one of our many jaunts this summer:

 As I wrote about last month, I am training for two half marathons, one being just over a week away.  Therefore the bulk of my training occurred in August.  Every weekend included a long run, and four other days during the week included running as well.  I have trained to the best of my ability, so here's hoping that race day goes smoothly.  

My goal is for a sub-two hour half marathon.  It has been my goal for years, but it's always been just out of reach.  For the first time however, I really do have hope that I can do it.  I have to take a deep breath saying that out loud, because I'll be really disappointed if I don't achieve my goal after all of this intense training, and now the world (or at least the small world that reads this blog) will know it.  Running a half marathon in under two hours will require me to run at a nine minute mile...for all 13 miles.  Easy for some, I know.  But ever since high school I have been a pretty consistent 10 minute miler.  So I really had to amp up the training and break out of my comfort zone.  Am I confident?  No.  Not by a long shot.  But I do have hope.

Wish me luck!

Fourth of July 2014!

Yes, yes, I am almost two months late on this, but I wanted to post some pictures from our awesome holiday weekend.  The thing that made it amazing was that we got to spend time with so many of our family members!  We spent the Fourth at Grandma and Grandpa Hertzler's cabin with Tina, Jay, Dad, Beth, Grandma, Grandpa, and Paul and Debbie.  Then on Sunday we had mom, Tina, Jay, and Grandma and Grandpa D over to our house.  Weekends like that are the whole reason we moved back to PA.  It gives us such joy to spend time with our families and to know that our girls are being raised surrounded by an extended family that loves them.

I bought the cutest Fourth of July dresses for them at a local festival, so I thought I'd snap a few quick IPhone pics of them that morning.  Easy, right?  WRONG!  Here are some outtakes:

I managed to get one good one of each of them individually, so I settled for that:

I borrowed one of Tina's camera's for a few days, and I did manage to get some cute shots.  (Be prepared for photo overload):

Grandpa and Addy playing Chinese Checkers

Grandma and Emmy cheering them on :)

The festive dessert that I made

Bubbles on the ATV (or AVT as Addy calls it)

Again, the combined pics weren't working.  They relented and held hands, but they weren't going to smile about it.

Got some really cute ones of the girls with Paul and Debbie:

Love this one of Addy:

And this one of Emma:

I love this pic of Mike and Debbie :)

Sweet Emma :)

Yup those crazy dogs were there too :)

Emma's preferred way of playing with a squirt gun?  Straight up drinking out of it.

As always, we had to attempt a family photo.  This is the best we could get :)  

What an awesome weekend at the cabin!  I had a great time snapping away the whole time with the fancy camera :)  Now we're back to Iphone photos:

All three of my girls were exhausted after a long day...

...but not too tired to stay up until almost 11PM "spying" on us from the loft.  Notice that little face peering through the railings up there :)

And that ends our photo montage of the Fourth of July cabin trip!

On Sunday my mom's side of the family came over to our house for a cookout.  Yup, the girls wore the same outfits.  In hopes of cute pics.  Ha ha ha ha ha ha.  

I hold out hope that one of these days they'll surprise me and just SMILE!

I love this one of Grandma and Grandpa with the girls:

And one last family photo to round out the post:

I can't say enough about how much fun we had that weekend!  Times like these are so precious :)