October

Oh, October, you really wore me out. I knew the month was off to an excellent start when I found Charlie like this one morning. I wondered if he was subtly trying to tell me something with the exact placement of the stickers...


Antonia spent a good part of the month of October sitting in this basket, and, well, can you blame her?
One afternoon, and probably the only afternoon in the entire month when nobody had anything on the schedule and the van battery was dead (lucky coincidence) we squeezed into the Civic for a jaunt to the local bird habitat. (What? Your area doesn't have a bird habitat? Too bad for YOU) The bird habitat is about as close as you can come to being in "nature" in Las Vegas, if your definition of "nature" is loose enough to include man-made ponds and swamps. Ours is, because we're relativists.

RAGNAR

But the main happening in October, the thing that almost did me in, was the culmination of several months of planning, preparation and psychosis (ie. unsoundness of mind.) That event was the Las Vegas Ragnar Relay, a 180-mile, 24-hour race traversing much of the Las Vegas Valley. In other words, PURE AWESOMENESS. A good bit of the organizational responsibilities of getting the team together and ready fell to me as captain of our 12-member team, and I'm not a singularly organized person, hence the stress and unsoundness of mind. But it was totally worth the effort; our team was a fantastic bunch of people and the race itself was a fabulous and memorable experience. If you think this kind of thing sounds like your bag of potato chips, let me distill some of the lessons our team learned into a few key points for you to ponder. And if you STILL think it sounds like your bag of potato chips, then let me know, because I want to be on YOUR team next year :)

Point #1. Make sure you know somebody like my friend Allyson who hangs out with a lot of go-getters who can be recruited for your team. As you can probably imagine, it takes an above-average amount of gumption to sign up for something that involves running 3-8 miles, three times in a 24-hour period. You might think you personally know 11 people who would be up for that sort of thing, but you're probably wrong.
Point #2. Pick a team name that will provide plenty of fodder for jokes, because you'll really need something to laugh about when it's 3am and you're getting ready to run 7 miles uphill in the dark. We elected to name our team after that paragon of fitness Izzy Mandelbaum. If you're not familiar with his many motivational mantras for the aspiring athlete, check him out here.
Point #3. You might think it's fun to be late for the handoff, but actually some of your teammates might not really love to stand in the chute and wait for you to come take the baton (slap bracelet) after just finishing a really hard run. As a matter of fact, it's a little anticlimactic to sprint towards that finish, expecting to pass the baton to your teammate and send him off running, only to discover that the chute is empty and race officials are helplessly calling out "Team Mandelbaum!! Team Mandelbaum!! Your runner is here! Anyone from Team Mandelbaum?!" But also, it IS kind of funny. Sometimes.
Point #4. A runner who has joined a team called "Pants are Optional" clearly does not take himself too seriously, particularly given the fact that he is wearing only a Speedo, and will not mind at all if you yell "Hey, Wedge!" out the window to him as you drive by in your team vehicle.
Point #5. Try not to get so distracted by checking out how other teams decorated their vehicles that you forget to periodically give water to your current runner. This can be especially important when it's 3pm and 80 degrees in the shade and your runner is running 8 miles straight uphill. It's a little bit fun and exciting to discover your runner has gotten heat exhaustion and is dehydrated, because you can think of all the ways that you can get her an IV without race officials finding out (grounds for disqualification of that runner) but in the long run, it's probably better for your runner to not have to spend three hours puking in a cold sweat.

(Van 2: Eric Elison, Bryan Hall, Adrienne Daines, Stephanie Harwood, Jenny Salter, Sean Stevens)

Point #6. If you're a man (women will intuitively know this) try and resist the urge to eat an entire Capastrami sub at 11pm when you will be running your 2nd leg of the race at 4am the next morning. It will be hard, it's true, because you will be very, very hungry for some real food after snacking on candy corn and granola bars since the race began 12 hours ago. But you should try and remind yourself that pastrami is basically just meat-flavored butter, and it will NOT sit well in the intestinal tract for an entire six miles of bouncing and jostling.
Point #7. It can be kind of fun to find out that an extra mile has been added to your teammate's leg, but not tell him until AFTER he's run that leg.
Point #8. Make sure you have a teammate who isn't afraid to chase snakes out of the road for you on your night runs. It can be very handy in a deserty place like the Lake Mead area. Your excessively fashionable headlamp is useful for spotting the wildlife, and the vest is so the wildlife and/or drivers can spot you.
Point #9. Make mental note of each teammate's "gait" so that as you drive along looking for your runner (to come behind him/her and honk and scare him/her. Just kidding. That kind of thing is frowned upon.) Where was I? So that as you drive along looking for your runner you can say "Yep, that's Pam's gait." Or "Nope, that's not Bryan's gait." It's fun to say "gait."

Does it look like I have an awesome gait in this picture?

This lovely lady (Stephanie Wheelwright Harwood) and I have been running together since we were 15. And just look at how far we've come! We look almost 20 now!

Point #10. Make a rule that anyone who gets a really, really big blister MUST show everyone. That might strike you as gross, but it can be pretty cool, too.
Point #11. If you are changing in the Porta-John, and an article of your clothing happens to fall into the toilet area, you should probably just leave it there. It's really not very sanitary to fish things out of the toilet, you know.

(It's a relay tradition for the whole team to run across the finish line together, even though only one runner is actually finishing at that point. It's symbolic or something, and also it's one way to make sure that everyone shows up at the finish line to see the sponsors who are hawking their wares. )

Point #12. Definitely, definitely take plenty of pictures! After it's all over and you finally get to go home and sleep for 10 hours straight, you might wake up in such a fog that you won't even know if it really happened, or if it was all just a wonderful dream. (Or nightmare, depending on how many hills you had in your 3 legs of the race...)

DISNEYLAND

All of my family from Idaho came down to Vegas for the Race, either as runners or as volunteers, so we took advantage of having the cousins all together and made a short trip to California for a day at the Happiest Place on Earth.

It's pretty obvious from the look on little Dorothea's face that she knows she's in the Happiest Place on Earth in this picture.

The day was a tiny bit rainy and overcast, but while it did not impede our fun at all, it DID make the park significantly less crowded. We were able to do much, much more than you would normally be able to accomplish because of the crowds, which made me feel like the Happiest Mom on Earth. Except for when Antonia started screaming, SCREAMING right in the middle of the Finding Nemo ride, at the really quiet part, of course, in really close quarters with 40 other non-screaming people.
Charlie had great fun with his cousins, whose presence emboldened him to try rides that he might otherwise have avoided. As it was, the only thing he avoided was the live Captain Hook at the villains meet-and-greet. And by avoided, I mean he pretty much would never have spoken to me again if we had not immediately vacated the premises upon the arrival of Captain Hook.

CHARLIE'S BIRTHDAY

Directly after Ragnar and Disneyland, bing-bang-boom we geared up for Charlie's 4th birthday. That was directly after I recovered from passing out upon realizing that crap! it was the end of October already, and crap! there was no time for a party like I would love to lavish on him. Good thing we decided that our family birthday tradition would NOT include big, lavish parties. So far Charlie's birthday tradition has been going to the school district employee health fair and getting a flu shot, and also getting an awesome balloon motorcycle. (Actually, last year it was a balloon Elmo, as you may recall, those of you long-time readers. )
If you were ever wondering what kind of movie melts my heart and makes me grin like a giddy schoolgirl, it's "WALL-E," and if you haven't seen it, might I recommend it? Charlie loves it as much as I do, so of course that was a given for a b-day present.

Let me speak of Charlie for a moment, as parents are oft wont to do when a child has a birthday. I may wax sentimental and even sappy in this paragraph, just so you know. The other day I was helping at Charlie's preschool with another student's mom, playing games and doing a craft. As the kids were rounded up to get ready to leave, she and I chatted a bit and she remarked that Charlie just seems really sweet. And he is; his sweetness is kind of an umbrella for many more specific personality traits, but mainly he is just sweet, and I'm so enamored with his sweetness. About 90% of the time when I look at him I just want to squeeze him close to me and stroke his little face; he's just so easy to love. Most of the time...

HALLOWEEN

I love Halloween. Love it. Love it. Love it. It combines two things that I'm passionate about: candy and dress-ups. Having kids has upped the ante because now we can do a family costume theme. Can you guess the theme of this year's costumes? Exclude Charlie from the group, he insisted on being a ninja, but we already had Antonia's lion costume from two years ago and a theme that included a lion and a ninja was beyond the bounds of my creativity. I'll give you a hint: it's literary. I'll post the answer in my next post, if you can wait that long! Heh, heh, heh...(I started cackling when I was dressed as a witch, and I just really took to it.)