The Last Five Years

(Not to be confused with the musical of the same name, which I love, but which I haven't actually listened to in its entirety for the last five years, because after I was married it suddenly became too sad.)

Five years ago yesterday I went from being a bachelor (read: lonely) to being a husband (read: blissfully happy).  Five years is a pretty big milestone, and we have always and often talked about the big plans of funtivities we would do and places we would travel when we reached it, but when the time finally came, we found we had our hands pretty full with this:

So those plans will have to wait a little while.  But, northeastern coast or southwestern coast or right here in the mountains, we're still joyously and quietly celebrating five glorious years of marriage, and just over a year of having added a third most splendid member to our party.  Marriage has been a lot of things so far, some of which I expected, and some of which I never could have anticipated, but all of it, up, down and in between, has been just exactly what I want and need.  This girl of mine is special and she really does make me want to be better in every way.

Ah, so young.  She's just as lovely though (lovelier!).

I'll post again later with more details about the house (that we have purchased -- OoO -- and what a story it is!) and our actual day-of celebration, however minimal and/or subdued it was (what am I saying, we had our first flood!), but for now...

... happy fifth anniversary, Wife!!!  I promise I'll take you to Maine one day, but in the meantime let's just keep emptying boxes and filling closets and stocking shelves and spending money to make this house our home.

July 2014 Races

We did some races last month!  I kept putting off posting about them, but no more.

First, on the 19th we joined in the Pound the Pavement For Parenthood crowd in Orem.  We heard about this race through Groupon or some such, and hadn't ever run it before, but it was fun and a pretty good, level course, and maybe we'll do it again next year.  What cause could be better than helping young couples who are hoping and praying and trying to add a wee young human to their family?  The boys did the 5K, and The Wife decided to go for the 10K this time.  There were quite a few runners for the 5K, but the 10 didn't have quite as many as we expected, and it was hot but not miserable.  I did pretty well at about 23:54 (7:25/mile), not my fastest, but pretty good for pushing a stroller, and it was 3.2 miles too, coming in apparently 2nd overall (they only gave awards for first place, and evidently the guy ahead of me was also pushing a stroller.  Fitting for a family-themed race, eh?), and then I backtracked on the 10K route and we all finished Julie's race together.  Then during the awards they actually gave away several IVF cycles to some lucky raffle-winners, which may or may not have made certain parties cry just a bit.

Then, on Pioneer Day of all days, we went from Temple...

... to Temple!

Mom and Dad joined us for our fun Pioneer Day race.  We were a little late getting started (so we parked farther away, thinking there would be no parking up at the temple, of which there turned out to be plenty...), which was kind of frustrating, since we were at the back of the pack from the very start, which meant that we were basically running into hundreds of street-wide walls of thousands of moseying people the entire time.  Still, we weaved our way through and made it to the end, and I had to get over my racing instinct of trying to go as fast as I possibly could, since it just wasn't going to happen.

Thanks for coming, Mom and Dad!

Baby's a lot bigger than he was at this race last year.

Ahahaha, his first [running] bib.

Yay for summer races!  (Though I always look forward to the fall ones more.)