1:05:25

I did it! Last Saturday I joined 32,000+ other runners, joggers, walkers, costumed superheroes, Indiana Joneses, a man dressed as a giant cockroach, Ms. Pac Man, guys dressed in drag and other weirdoes in the Monument Avenue 10k in Richmond.

I'd be lying it I said it was a piece of cake. It was tough. But I did it. And it felt good to cross the finish line.

I am a little upset at my time, however. I wanted to finish under an hour.

I blame my phone.

My handy dandy Sony Ericsson Walkman cell phone is equipped with a neat little fitness application that I’d been using for my training. It tracked my running distance, calories burnt, time, mph, etc. Really cool, right? Well…not really. Turns out I didn’t calibrate it correctly. It was off by about 0.3/mile. I discovered this at around mile 1 of the 10k, when I looked at my phone and it read “1.3 miles.” I quickly did the math and realized that I’d be running about 2 miles more than I had trained. This put a damper in my run. I think I walked more than I ran those last 2 miles…

After I came to terms with the fact that finishing under an hour was out of the question. I changed my goal. I spotted the cockroach guy about 100 yards ahead of me and was determined to get a better time than him. Turns out, however, cockroaches are pretty fast, what with having six legs and all…

I did end up passing the Ms. Pac Man guy and a guy wearing a diaper, though…so I had THAT going for me.

Our Crazy Weather

So, last week the Richmond area suffered the worst snow storm in more than 10 years. We got 8+ inches of snow. The kids got their first taste of "real" snow. They went sledding, had snowball fights, made snow angels, ate a LOT of snow and generally had the time of their lives.

Our house got hammered. We lost a few big branches and half of a tree from the weight of the snow.



Fast forward one week. On Saturday and Sunday it averaged 80 degrees! We spent pretty much the entire weekend outdoors. And the kids, of course, had a blast!


Oh...and I snapped this picture of Kristin when she wasn't looking (she's going to kill me). She is really looking all cute a pregnant :-)


We've got only about 2 1/2 months to go before baby #3 arrives. We've been throwing names around. On top of my list is Zelda, but for some reason keeps getting shot down. I think it is a perfectly good name. Kristin does not...

Our Tooth Fairy

Hey. Remember this blog? I sure as heck don't. My laziness knows no bounds!

Anyhoo...Patty hit an adolescent milestone today. She lost her first tooth! OK. She didn't "loose" it per say. More like I yanked it from her gums...blood and all...

She was a trooper though. She didn't shed a single tear. It also probably helped that I put a numbing cream on her gums before I did it.

The tooth fairy is coming tonight! And apparently is much richer than when I was a kid. Rumor has it she's getting $5. Mostly because the tooth fairy's wallet (or purse) doesn't have any smaller bills in it.

That's all I got for now. I'll do my best to try and update this thing more than once every few months...


Peace out.

Our Christmas

OK. It's been almost a month since I've updated this blog. I figure I should post SOMETHING. We're all in full out Christmas panic mode at the Stevens' household. The girls have been hyped up since about the day after Thanksgiving. And now we're at DEFCON 5 (or is it DEFCON 1. I don't know which is the most imminent). They can't seem to calm down. It probably doesn't help that they have been shoving sugar down their throats for the past few weeks what with all the Christmas parties they've been attending (at school and friends houses, etc). And today we made and decorated sugar cookies - with icing, sprinkles and M&Ms. If anyone who happens to read this comes by our house on Christmas I advise you to NOT eat the cookies. Most are covered with a fine layer of saliva from the kids constant hand licking and smoothing out the frosting with their fingers. Yummy!

Here are a few pictures from our cookie-making day. And also there is video of the girls singing their version Rudolph the Red Nose Reindeer - or as I like to call it - Rudolph the Tone Def Reindeer. American Idol is not in their future.

Our Thanksgiving

A few days ago Patty came home from school with a turkey she made by stuffing a brown paper bag with tissue paper. Glued to it were its feathers and head. She showed it to me and seemed a little disappointed with her work. “What’s wrong?,” I asked her.

“Well,” she said. “I think it looks more like a peacock than a turkey.”

“I think it looks like a GREAT turkey,” I said.

“It doesn’t even have a snood,” she said. “Turkeys are supposed to have a snood.”

“What is a snood?”

“A snood is that little red thing that hangs from a turkey’s beak,” she said. “I learned about it in school. You didn’t know that? I thought you knew everything!”

Patty’s life lesson #1 – daddy don’t know squat…

Anywhoo… I hope everyone who reads this has a happy and safe Thanksgiving. We are headed to NOVA to have brunch/dinner with my family, and to participate in our annual Stevens family Thanksgiving Day football game. It’s a lot of fun and usually ends with someone running home hurt and in tears (usually me).

Our 15 Minutes

I have a theory that, thanks to the recent reality-TV explosion, each and every person in the world will have a chance to star in their own television show at some point in their lives. This may be our first and only shot.

A few months ago Kristin, I and the kids were approached by Virginia Commonwealth University to be participants in a VCU-produced TV program called "Secrets of the Sequence." It's a classroom teaching video series that focuses on a number of medical topics. They were interested in our family (who wouldn’t be!) because of the all the various medical conditions we suffer from (my eyes, Patty's eyes, Amanda's eyes, everybody's eyes...etc). A video crew spent a day with us, following the kids to a doctor's appointment, visiting our house, interviewing Kristin and I and shooting footage of the kids playing and us playing with the kids.

The title of the video we participated in is called All in the Family: Genetics and Family Health History and focuses on heredity and how our genes (not jeans - you Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants fans) pass inherited traits from one generation to the next (i.e. - eyes) and the importance of keeping a good family medical history.

The video is about 10 minutes long and is very informative. If you’ve got some time, I suggest you take a look. You might learn something ;-)

Fall Back

Ahhhh Fall...

This is what I have to look forward to for the next month or so. Raking leaves.

It's a lot of fun...well not really...It's a lot of back breaking work. Most folks in my neighborhood use bagger attachments for their mowers, leaf blowers or hire landscaping companies to do the work for them. Me. I use the old fashioned method. A rake.

It's good exercise, but I hate exercise...

One year I had the bright idea to use my riding mower to mulch the leaves. It didn't work out like I planed. The heat from my mower blades ended up making the leaves catch fire. My mower overheated and the drive belt broke. I was not a happy camper.

This year I'll stick with the rake. Wish me luck :)