Joy's Life and Times: Procrastinator

I learned that I'm a pretty good procrastinator in college when I'd have a paper due and leave most of it until the night before, when I would scramble home after a mini track party to type. I always have wanted to be a person who gets things done early so that I can relax and enjoy myself, and not have things hanging over my head. But anyway, I did it again. I kept putting off registering for the half marathon until last week, I guess so I could back out any time. I'm not registering a year in advance for ironmans these days, and I suppose by comparison you can get into other races relatively close to race date. I pulled up the website and saw a huge (month-old) post that said SOLD OUT. Nice one Joy. But the VIP race, for just $250, was open. No thanks. The two person relay was also open. Ok... Let me just think about this one... Yeah that works! I have come up with a plan for Jenny and me which involves her running the second leg and me running the whole thing. Technically, I could possibly be called a partial bandit runner, but I'm paying and racing and I just want to do the full course! Plus this way if I really bomb, there will be no record :) It seems I put off doing a lot of real training too, and lo and behold, it's too late. I know there's a lot of sand bagging and avoidance of training details put out on the internet in blogs and whatnot, and I understand that. Unfortunately I'm not doing that. I had my high mileage weeks break into the low 30s twice. I've been running 3-4 times a week, and usually taking a day or two completely off. It just hasn't fit into the schedule lately since it has been getting dark early. And now it's cold and dark! The trainer will be coming into the playroom for me tonight. The pool donned its bubble this week. I guess it's really fall, sadly. I even broke out the knicker tights for running Sunday when I went out for a few tempo miles. I'm hoping for race day magic since those 3 at 7:00 pace sure seemed too hard to keep up for over an hour and a half. I'm going into this race knowing I really didn't give my best effort in training, but also remembering that I never have trained specifically for a half marathon, so why can't I PR?

Enough about running, let me not procrastinate any more in posting some toddler pictures, and the events of the last few weeks.

We had a crew of Harwoods come last weekend-- Hunter's Mammo and great aunt Nanny as well as his great grandmother GG and great grandfather LaLa!

We and the local cousins spent a beautiful fall day at a pumpkin patch with pigs and goats, a donkey and a tractor, lots of corn, hay, and pumpkins.

No hesitation, they all climbed right up to the top

I make funny toddler jokes. I got Ethan to laugh at me.

Em is a good baby chaser.

It's harder to get my own baby to laugh when I'm behind him.

While pigs do grunt, as Hunter will demonstrate for us, they also squeal very loudly when picked up! Very loudly.

Matching is our game lately. We match colors, animals, similar objects. I can tell him to go pick the crayon that matches the green chair, and he picks it out of 20 colors perfectly. He laughs when he finds 2 horses and holds them up together. He shows mini Mickey the blanket with his face on it. So funny. He even laughs at my attempt at jokes. Like one night he started sitting on a balloon and I said, "Hunter is laying an egg!" And he died laughing and wanted me to keep repeating it. I'm quite the comic, you should know.

He loves to be surrounded by his animals. And check out Tigger's adoring look.