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Every Easter morning as a child, my mother made my sister and I stand in front of the house in our fancy clothes for a picture. I used to hate it. Eventually I refused and I always swore that I would never subject my kids to such foolishness. But then, apparently, I got old.

Easter 2010

Easter 2009

Easter 2008

My kids, unlike their parents, love to get dressed up.  Maybe it’s because we don’t force it on them like it was forced on us.  This year, we didn’t even buy “Easter clothes”.  In 2008 and 2009 Tristan wore the same pair of shoes and in 2009 and 2010 Mackenzie wore the same pair.  No rosy background this year.  We pruned them to promote new growth.  And look in those pictures at how much weight Monk has lost in the last two years. (I’ll save a Monk update for a later post when I’m in more of a creative zone.)

Now I see why my mother did this to me!

I hope you had a Happy Easter as well!

Beautiful Day + $1.00 at Wal-mart = Lots of fun for a 3-year old.

This weekend, we took in parts of Macon’s Cherry Blossom Festival.  We usually go the Thursday night before and ride things for free (like we did last year), but Tristan’s first t-ball game interfered with those plans.

We didn’t ride anything this year, but we did visit the Arts & Crap (crafts) Festival, the park, and Ocmulgee National Monument, where during Cherry Blossom weekends, you can explore the park at night.  I would highly recommend those Lantern Light Tours.

I wanted to take the kids this year because Macon is dying a quick death and the Festival might not be around much longer.  Besides, if I get my way (a new job), I won’t be around here much longer either!

I decided to plant a vegetable garden this year.  I’m not quite sure why.  I don’t really need something else to do and I don’t eat anything that I’m planting.  I guess I was just up for the challenge.

I’m attempting to grow peppers and pumpkins from seeds and tomatoes from store-bought plants.

I built this raised bed last fall to accomodate the vegetable garden. Here’s a PROTIP for you from Farmer Jonathan: When you build a food garden out of landscaping timbers, you should always let it sit for at least six months before adding your soil. This keeps the chemicals used to treat the wood from compromising your soil.

Even Farmer Kimberlie decided to get in on the action with sunflowers. We’ve planted sunflowers several times in the past and they always rock.

And we scored a nifty little rain gauge freebie this weekend at the Forsythia Festival . . . right before it rained on us!

Hopefully we will have a bounty of fresh veggies — even though we don’t eat them!

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!