The Gulley Gab: September 2009

...we love riding in the car! Well, not really, but we love going on fun trips! Jeremy, Sarah, and I took a mini vacation to Greenville for Labor Day weekend. We went up Saturday and took Sarah to her very first Furman football game. Jeremy's parents were in Hawaii on vacation so they let us have their game tickets. Sarah looked so cute and grown up in her little cheerleader outfit. She enjoyed sitting up in the stands...for about 30 minutes. At that point, I took her out where she could walk around, but she did not want to walk around. So we bought some food, and basically spent another 30 minutes carrying it around (carrying Sarah too) because otherwise she would scream. It had been my idea to leave the stroller in the car (because you can't take a stroller into a stadium, right?), but apparently that was a bad idea. You can in fact take strollers to the Furman stadium, and once we decided to walk back to the car to get it, Sarah was an angel. She also liked getting to take a detour by the lake to feed the ducks her hot dog bun :-) We hung around Greenville until Monday morning, and we visited the Greenville Zoo on our way out of town. Sarah loved the zoo--she was especially fascinated by the giraffes and all of the birds in their respective cages. Throughout the whole weekend, Sarah was slowly coming down with a cold, and she ran a low temp and got pretty congested, but we kept going and having fun anyway. By Tuesday, when we went back to school/work, she was pretty bad off with the congestion and coughing. I had to take her home from school only an hour after we got there because she kept coughing up junk on the floor--yuck! We went to the doctor and they said she "probably has the flu," although I am convinced that she did not have the flu but rather just the awful cold I had the week before. She was fine by Wednesday, which was good, because Thursday afternoon we headed to Saint Simons for a long beach weekend! Jeremy had to stay home because it turned out he couldn't miss work, but we went ahead with my parents, brother (+ Anna) and sister, aunt, uncle, and cousin (+ Shawn). We pretty much had fabulous weather and a GREAT view from our ocean front balcony. We splurged on the unit in our condo since the rates went way down after labor day. It was weird to take off work to go to the beach, but it was SO nice going in September. The condo place was practically deserted, we had no restaurant waits, and the beach was not at all crowded. We had so much fun just relaxing at the beach and the pool. Sarah LOVED the sand and the ocean but was very hesitant to let go of an adult's hand while standing at the edge of the water. She got better and better each day, though :-) She loved having her own personal baby pool to play in (I don't think we ever saw anyone else in that pool the whole time we were there!). Sarah was a trooper in the car on the way home, and I discovered that using the tray for her booster seat as a toy tray in the car was a FABULOUS idea! She also worked really hard during the trip on her potty training, and she stayed dry for both 6 hour trips! It did mean that we had to make LOTS of potty stops, though :-(

At home, we are continuing to work on the potty training. Sarah wore her "big girl pants" to school on Thursday and Friday. She did have 2 accidents late in the day on Thursday and one on Friday morning, so I'm not sure what we will do for school on Monday. I am trying to leave her in the underwear when we're at home, but I am still too chicken to put her in it when we go out "in public." She's really doing great, though :-) Work is going great and we had a fun field trip to the Fire Station on Friday. One little boy got really scared, I'm not even sure why, but all in all, it was a great field trip.

Leslie and I are counting down the weeks (days?) to our 1/2 marathon that's coming up on October 4th--yikes! Today was supposed to be our last "big" run, 12 miles. We had the grand idea to run from her house in Grayson to my house in Bethlehem, since we clocked it to be 11.7 miles. We started out running this morning, despite the awful weather forcast, and we kept going when it started sprinkling. We even kept going when it started solid raining. We went until our shoes were soaked and the thunder began to roll and the cars driving by were splashing us :-) At that point we decided to call Clint, Leslie's husband, to come bail us out. We ended up running about 5 miles, which was still a good run in the rain, I suppose :-) I'm really scared about the distance of the race, but I think we're both ready and it should be lots of fun!

Sunrise from our balcony

Playing with play dough in the car

Aunt Rebecca/Becca/Becky and Sarah

Fun in the pool

Chariots of Fire run on the beach

Do I have something on my face?

Running on the beach

Mommy and Sarah in the ocean

Cute little feet!

Playing in the sand

Sarah making a picture face

Coolest playground ever

Can I climb this tree, daddy?

Go Furman!

Hot dogs, yum! And what a pout!