Happy Memorial Day!

We had a pretty fun Memorial Day. It was a safe one, all of us were healthy, and this is the first time in 3 years that we did not have to go to the ER for something due to the long weekend. As I write this, I do worry since we have about 12 hours until our dr's offices open in the morning, but hopefully, we are in good shape. We started the day by attending the Novi Parade, which starts about 1/10 of a mile from our place, so it was just a short walk away. Keira enjoyed the children and the horses, but was a little nervous about the loud fire engines and sirens. She enjoyed collecting the TONS of candy that was thrown out at us, I am sure one of the benefits of being so close to the start of the route. Keira was also very excited about the large bundle of balloons that she received because they were too tangled to separate. We did manage to get them apart once arriving home, and they provided a great deal of entertainment. Keira is trying to count, and can say "one" and "two", and sometimes will say "three", but spent time rearranging the balloons and pretending to count them (up to 2).

We also were able to complete our patio/yardwork this weekend. We didn't have a ton of work to do on it, but it still took a while to complete. It mostly consisted of raking up leaves and putting down new mulch, as well as some pruning of the bushes. We did not need to do any planting- our hostas are taking over everywhere, and our rose bushes appear healthy this year as well. We just had the addition of two new baskets to complement the one I received as a mother's day present.

Ryan and Keira taking a break from their hardwork just outside of our patio. Fortunately this part of the yard is the responsibility of the association, and we do not need to mow or weed. We do have daylilies that are just to the left of the shot, but they haven't bloomed yet, and are not very exciting to look at.

Earlier in the week, Keira and I traveled to Kalamazoo, MI to volunteer in a Girls on the Run, event http://www.girlsontherun.org/as part of my sponsorship with Team Stayput. We passed out samples of all kinds of fun hair accessories and had a "Happy Hair" station, where we styled the girls' hair with the various samples they selected and sprayed their hair with glitter and colored hairspray. It was fun, and the girls were very excited about it. Keira really enjoys playing with hair accessories, so she enjoyed it. She even let me style her hair and kept it in until it was time to leave.
Ryan spent the day working at the farm at Maybury, building a pen to keep the turkeys and peacocks safe from coyotes, as well as performing other outdoor clean up work. It was part of Ford's program to allow employees to do service projects on company time with other members of their organizations in approved projects. Maybury State Park is a favorite of ours, so this was an obvious choice for him.

Finally, for this entry, I was recently featured for my running on Tyler and Minde's friend Nikki's pregnancy blog for my running and sponsorship. She is a fellow expecting athlete, and started her blog because it is really hard to find good information for women who are extremely active in their sports prior to pregnancy that would like to continue at some level during it. Hopefully my feature will inspire other women to keep doing what they love while they are pregnant, as long as they are sensible about it.

Check it out at:

http://afatlotofgood.blogspot.com/