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On Friday, it snowed. And snowed. And snowed.  In fact, it was more snow than I have ever seen in Georgia.

When I was about 6, we had a little snowfall and had to use cardboard to slide down the hills in our neighborhood.  My grandmother was determined that I would not be sliding on cardboard anymore!  So for Christmas that year, my sister and I were given these awesome sleds from the JCPenney catalog.  Then they sat in storage for 25 years, waiting on the next great snowfall . . .

This is one time that being a pack-rat paid off!  Those sleds were worth the wait!

It was a fabulous weekend!  Sledding was finally conquered and multiple snowmen were built (pieces of some still remain). I’m probably the only person in central Georgia who owns real sleds!

(BTW, I totally stole the title of this post from Kristi F)

This past weekend was Walt Disney World Marathon Weekend.  This is the second year that I’ve participated.  On Thursday, we checked the kids out of school early and headed down to the Wide World of Sports for the expo and packet-pick up.

The Expo

Friday morning I ran the Up and Away Family Fun Run 5K.  I didn’t really have any time goals for this race.  My current 5K PR is around 24 minutes and I knew I wouldn’t come close to that.  With 5000 runners in a race, it’s nearly impossible to run for a time goal.  Besides, I wanted to save my energy for the Half-Marathon on Saturday.  It was around 40 degrees at the beginning of the 5K, which I thought was pretty cold at the time.  Little did I know. 

The 5K was a nice run around and through a pre-dawn Epcot. I finished in a little over 26 minutes.

UP house at the 5K start

5K Start at Epcot

On Saturday came the race I’ve been waiting for.  The Half-Marathon.  This was the race I had trained for.  I thought the 5K was cold, but on Saturday it was in the very low 30s with a wind chill in the 20s.  And sleet . . . in Central Florida.  Lots of sleet and rain for the entire 13.1 miles.  Nevertheless, the family came out and cheered for me.  We had previously made signs and shirts and Kimberlie committed to getting up at 3:30 in the morning and chasing me around Walt Disney World.

My family at 3:30 in the morning

Me and an army man before the start

Tristan with his sign

The race started and I felt really good at first, but then the heel pain started creeping on. My time goal was 2 hours, but it ended up taking me 2 hours and 14 minutes. Of course, part of that was stopping to take pictures with characters, part of it was the sleet (and ice in my eyes) and the rest can be attributed to heal pain.  By 8:00 am, it was over and we were back in the hotel.  It took my body until well after noon to heat up and stop shivvering.

Princess Tiana along the course

Daisy with the family after the half-marathon

On Sunday morning, my feet were killing me.  Unfortunately, I had to get out of bed at 3:30 and run 26.2 miles before sitting in the car for a six hour ride home.  How was I going to do it?  On marathon morning, it was 26 degrees with a wind chill in the teens.  Brrrrr.

Starting Line	Characters at the Start	Pluto at Epcot
Hot air balloon	Reindeer in the cold	Dopey

It was so cold, that the course was icy. The powerade was slushy. The bananas were frozen solid. People dressed in layers and shed them as they ran. Disney collected the clothing, laundered them, and donated them to charity — over 30,000 pieces.

Somehow, I was able to finish. Over 8,000 of the 24,000+ marathoners did not finish.  Although it took over 6 hours.  At the time, I didn’t think I had ever been in that much pain before, but now I can’t remember — sort of like when a female goes through childbirth.  In fact, I plan on registering for all of the races again next year.

This photo made it worth all of the time, energy, effort and expense.

My bling bling: UP medal, Donald medal, Mickey medal and Goofy medal

A few weeks ago, I mentioned that we attended part of the taping for the Disney Parks Christmas Day Parade.  I also included a few of the 500 pictures I snapped and one of the videos I shot.  Here is a tilt-shift video, created by Disney of the Christmas parade.

As you can see, tilt-shift is a cool technology.  I consider it analogous to HDR photography, but even cooler.  Here are links to two other tilt-shift videos with short explanations by Disney if you are interested in the technology:

Magic Kingdom Tilt-shift
Epcot Tilt-shift
Tilt-shift Explanation

Here are some screen shots from the video, so that you can see where to find us in the parade.  It airs tomorrow, Christmas Day, at 10:00 AM on your local ABC channel.

For the second time in my life, I was able to take part in the taping of a very popular Christmas special.  In 2007, Kimberlie and I were a part of “Oprah’s Favorite Things” and were showered with overpriced merchandise by a television diva.  Other than that, there is only one other holiday television special that I would love to be a part of, and somehow I managed to pull it off this year.

This past weekend, we were invited to be part of the taping of the Disney Parks Christmas Day Parade.  Basically, they entice you to come be a part of the crowd with free entry into the Magic Kingdom for the day.  We were unable to make the Kris Allen (American Idol) taping on Thursday or the Celine Dion taping on Friday due to work and school schedules, so we decided to go down for the Jonas Brothers on Saturday. 

The Jonas Brothers sang a three minute song called Summertime Anthem, but it took us four hours to shoot the performance.  The director made them sing it no less than 10 times.  Part of that was teaching the 5000 member audience to break out into a flash-mob style dance routine towards the end of the song.  It was awesome!  By shear luck, we ended up at the very front of the stage!

The parade taping was another grueling six hours, because performers had to perform over and over and over for the perfect camera angles.  Steve Rushton (singer) and the Santa Buddies (dogs from a new Disney Christmas movie) were there and all of it was hosted by Kelly Ripa.  No Regis this year due to surgery!  And by shear accident, we ended up on center street, where the performers performed.

Of course I shot over 500 pictures and 3 videos.  Here is a small sample:

Check out the video to see how close we were to the action!

Be sure to watch the parade Christmas morning on ABC.  There is no possible way that they can show the parade without including some very good shots of us.  You should definitely watch for the shot of  Tristan and me dancing (above) during the “Move it, Shake it, Celebrate it” portion of the parade.

This weekend, we celebrated Tristan’s 6th birthday with a final trip to the Disney theme parks (for a long time).

I can’t believe I have a SIX year old!

Mackenzie got her first haircut this weekend, on her 3.333333 birthday.  That’s 3 and 1/3 for the non-mathematicians. 

She did a great job sitting still, which was surprising.  The shop gave us a card that says “Baby’s First Haircut” — as if we have a baby!

In past years, we’ve done some elaborate pumpkin designs.  This year, due to a busy week, we kept things simple and happy.

About six months ago, I came across pictures of a fad I had not heard about: Duct-tape prom dresses.  I was intriqued to say the least!  I wish I had a prom to go to!  Fast forward until now . . .  We knew that we were going to Mickey’s Not So Scary Halloween Party at the Magic Kingdom and we needed costumes.  Mackenzie has a Cinderella dress and Kimberlie and I could easily wing it, but what about Tristan?

Would it be possible to make a duct-tape costume?  Could I pull it off? Will the weather be mild enough to dress my son up in nothing but duct-tape?  I decided to go for it.  But what kind of costume?  Of course it had to be Disney-related, relatively easy to construct, and they had to have the colors available in duct-tape.  As I looked at all of our pictures with Disney characters from over the past year, I came across this one of me and Pinocchio.

I’m certainly no seamstress, but somehow I made it work. After all, it’s tape, so if you screw up, you just cut out the mistake and tape it back together!

It went really well. Everyone at the party typically dresses up as the popular characters: pirates, princesses, pooh, etc. Nobody else considered Pinocchio. One of the cast members told us that he sees about 50,000 costumes a night and it was the first Pinocchio he had seen. Others were amazed when they discovered that it was constructed of solely duct-tape.  Tristan thrived on all of the attention he received.  Many told us that if there had been a costume contest, he would have one it.  Wow!  Of course, it wasn’t comfortable walking around in duct-tape so he was walking a little funny — like a puppet — which is exactly what Pinocchio is.  Pottying proved difficult, but he could always hold it until the next day — when he became a real boy again!

By the way, it took 5 rolls of duct tape and about seven hours to put it all together.  I will certainly do it again in the future!

5 - AM wake up
9.1 – miles of running
15.5 – times around the block to make 9.1 miles
80 – minutes it took
4 – minute shower because running made me late
3 – times Tristan was told to not get a warning at school today
13 – mile drive to work
350 – suite number
5 – servers rebooted after 8AM because running made me late
1 – poptart
2 – bottles of water
2 – missed calls
1 – voicemail
4 – napkins to clean up Fred’s spilled coffee
5 – day weekend coming up
79 – messages stuck in the exchange queue because Microsoft sucks
25 – dollars to Amazon for completing a vendor survey
51 – videos encoded and uploaded
7 – sent emails trying to clear up email issues
1000 – things I would rather be doing

So after the accident, we finally made it to the bowling alley.  Kimberlie and I have only been bowling together twice before — once on a double date and once with the neighbors.  Bowling just isn’t our thing.  If we feel like bowling, we have a Nintendo Wii to keep us entertained.  Mackenzie didn’t really care for it much either, but as you can see from the pictures below, Tristan LOVES it!

I hope your weekend was enjoyable as well.