Trying Tri's and Other Fun

 

Last weekend we all piled (or really stuffed) into the Subaru on Friday afternoon to camp out a Patagonia Lake because I was going to compete in a sprint triathlon on Saturday morning. In an utterly uncharacteristic move I have been training quite diligently for the past three months for said race, up at 5 am to bike and run, heading over to the Y almost every Saturday, you get the idea.  I was nervous about the race because the lake was going to be about 65 degrees.  As it turns out it should have been nervous for the 8 mile with nothing but striaght up hill bike ride.... To make what could be a painfully long story short, I made it through the 500 meter lake swim but utterly failed at the second leg of the race, the bike ride.  Truth be told, around mile 3 when I got sick and was walking my bike again, I decided that is just wasn't fun, and by god somethings should be fun or just not done.  While I felt liberated for my decision after I turned around to ride back I now know that I will have to train and do this triathlete next year to redeem myself... but this time I will spend all of my training time going up hills!

Despite my race fail all was not lost in our weekend fun.  The camping was lovely, and on our way out of the park we stopped at a yard sale (because it said free coffee and Patrick could not resist) and Patrick and I ended up with rocking new cowboy hats.
 
We then made a pit stop at Hops and Vines (our favorite vineyard), on the way to Apple Annie's to acquire some fresh from the field pumpkins and get utterly lost in a corn maze.

I had never done a corn maze before and must admit, after a few times of fruitless circles got a little panicky.  To help you through you could bring with you a "passport" that had questions to answer where if you answered correctly you would turn the right way.  Evie grabbed one on girl scout trivia, I grabbed American history and Anna snagged movies.  As it turns out, we were the best at movie/TV trivia... thank goodness for knowing something about Mama Mia, Lord of the Rings and I love Lucy!

On Sunday we continued the weekend of random fun and went to the 4th birthday party of the month at pump it up... complete with blacklights and glow sticks.

 

As if that wasn't unique enough we then participated in Noche en Blanco, a flash-mob potluck dinner in the middle of the street in downtown Tucson.  It was quite the awesomely bizarre event, I felt like I knew 10% of the 2,000 random people there....  Perhaps most fortunately for us, we were all (Anna included) able to find our entire white get ups from goodwill!

Pretty sunflower from Apple Annies... not related to blog but had to share :)

Birthdays and other fun adventures

October seems to be a popular month for Evie and Izzy's friends to be born.  Uncharacteristically for us, we have had a birthday party to go to for almost every weekend during this month.  The weekend before last it was a jumping castle in the park extravaganza and then this weekend we had a pool party, where they rented the entire public pool, which included a 10 foot high dive.  If only I had thought to take pictures of Evie bravely plummeting off it time after time or Patrick and Anna (but not at the same time) following suit.  I think indicates the end of swimming season though because the water was quite cold!

We also have been continuing our sporadic attempts at French cooking.  The latest desert actually turned out pretty well!

Last week was fall break for the girls, so Monday we all took the day off and planted some roses in the yard.  Tuesday the girls hung out with my Mom and Wednesday they went to work with me for the morning.  I wanted to take them out for lunch at Eegees as a treat before I left for Flagstaff for a meeting, but also needed to get a tire fixed.  Naivly I thought it would only take a 1/2 hour or so, which would leave plenty of time for lunch.  It turns out the tire ordeal was a 2-hour affair, but fear not Eeggees was still had... via bus. And as it turns out the convinced Patrick to get them Eegees on Thursday and Mina on Friday... so the theme of break was colored ice drinks and sandwiches.

 

Other (weekend) adventures included a park and pancake performance by Evie.  I don't know why but Evie singing always gets me a little teary...

Red moon, greek festival, and Mexico, oh my!

 

 We have been filling the weeks and weekends with Fall(ish) fun. (This ish is for the fact that it is still generally over 90 degrees here :)  Two weekends ago we went out to the Greek Festival for the first time.  It was (above all else) a fabulous place to get a Saturday night dinner.  Evie was able to have a much anticipated sleepover with her friend (I say this because she is always asking for sleepovers and we almost never set them up for her... I just don't know how other parents coordinate this stuff!) and Izzy enjoying dancing to the pop songs in Greek.

The weekend ended with a spectacular blood moon (which, by the way, I thought was on Saturday night and was totally underwhelmed by on Saturday... good thing it was actually Sunday!)

Then last weekend I was only around for 1/2 the weekend (but still managed to decorate houses large and small) because early, early, early on Sunday morning I left for a week of work down in Aguascalientes, Mexico.  It was an utterly exhausting week, but super interesting and fun.

While I never had the chance to make it to the center of the city, I did get to the Museo Nacional de la Muerte on Sunday afternoon, an amazing restaurant (near an equally amazing church) on Wednesday, and to see one of the most interesting riparian areas I have ever seen during a field day on Thursday.
 

I woke up at 2 am yesterday to catch my flight home, and managed to make it back for 2:40 pm parent/teacher conferences and then take the girls (all three of them) out to see Pan last night.  I think I may just have to sleep for the rest of the weekend :)