Summertime!

Finally, it is sunny and beautiful today! Whohoo! I just feel like my mood is immediately better when I can wake up in the morning and see some sun.

Thursday morning, I got stuck in the craziest thunderstorm when I was out running! I was doing a 7 mile loop, and it was super foggy and overcast when I left, but no rain. I was feel pretty good until around mile 3 when the skies just opened up! Wind, rain, thunder, lightning, flash flooding across the roads... it was insane! I was literally running on the road in water so deep that it was up to my ankles. Whenever I could see that there were no cars coming, I would just run in the middle of the street to get out of the torrential rivers flowing down the sides! It was nuts and definitely earns a spot on my list of most memorable runs ever. So yea, not great weather that day - we took the boys to an indoor playspace and then out for lunch. It was nice to have Chad home to spend the day with.

Friday, the weather was still not great but not actively raining, so we took the opportunity to be outside and go to the zoo. Always a good time. In the afternoon I took my bike out, and guess what... got caught in a thunderstorm AGAIN! I swear, it was mostly sunny when I left our house! The funny thing was that it never did rain at our house, but I was a couple towns over, and it just poured on me. I'm beginning to think that these storms are stalking me. In other exciting news, I changed my bike tube for the first time ever! It was so easy, which was a relief because I had been kind of dreading it for years. Piece of cake though. Thank goodness for youtube because I watched a quick video of someone changing a tube and then just went outside and did it.

This morning I went swimming - thunderstorm free. In fact, it is sunny, breezy and extremely pleasant today. Chad took the boys bike riding all morning while I was at the lake... they even stopped for donuts and coffee, as the bike route Chad planned for them conveniently went right by the old coffee shoppe. We all got home around the same time and headed back out again to go hiking. We did a pretty long hike for the boys, 4 miles or so, and I was really impressed with how they pushed through it, even when they started to get tired. Especially after all the bike riding they did in the morning. We kept enticing them to keep going... "on our trail map, it shows a bridge coming up soon!" That kept them going for a while. It was a really nice hike.

So, I think I wrote that when Chad went to Chicago last week, he brought back little gifts for the boys from the Lego store. Brandon's gift was a dump truck that he had to follow the instructions and put together - and it's all those tiny little lego pieces that are so hard to keep track of. Anyway, Brandon LOVES this thing - puts it together several times a day. So, flashback to a few months back when a colleague of Chad's gave him around 3 bins of these tiny legos - literally thousands of them just thrown together. Chad figures that since Brandon likes building the lego sets now, there must be a way to figure out which sets are in these bins and a place to print out the building instructions for them. He found a website that shows you all the pieces that go to a particular set, along with instructions for building. Now it was just a matter of sorting these thousands of legos, some of them the size of my pinky nail into the appropriate sets. Oh boy. I helped Chad on this project for a couple hours last night, and that was enough for me. But, apparently after I went to bed, he soldiered on... sorting all the legos by color and size, bagging them, and then going through them and lining up the appropriate pieces with the sets they go with. So now, Brandon also had a space shuttle and LEM he can build off the instructions Chad printed. And Chad is over there now looking for more sets. Crazy, but is he a great father or what?? I think he is reliving some of his old love of legos from when he was around this age. I am very impressed by his dedication and determination!

Chad and I are going out tonight! Whohoo! Sheri-Lynne is babysitting (we return the favor tomorrow night). We are celebrating our anniversary (which is Tuesday)... we have been married for 8 years! Did you know that bronze is the traditional gift for the 8th anniversary? Oh bronze, so romantic. There may not be any bronze gifts in our future, but at least we get to enjoy an evening out together. I might even suck back a glass of wine to celebrate.