Where Are My Six Hours?

You would think that homeschooling two special needs children is very time consuming, you know, with the having to be responsible for all aspects of their schooling, their mothering, and the getting them to their various appointments, and you would be correct, it is time consuming. It's not just time consuming, it completely consumes you. It can consume you to the point that you forget you even exist.

Don't get me wrong, I loved homeschooling my children. By being with them all day long for so many years, I've come to know them and understand their challenges in a way I would have never gotten to know had they been in school for six hours every day. But I digress. The point I wanted to make was that now that my children are in a "brick and mortar school," I seem to have even less time. I'm busier than I ever was before.

What happened to the extra six hours a day I was supposed to gain by placing my children in a school outside the home? It seems that I spend all my time in the car, driving two children in two separate directions, driving them to two different schools,  getting them to their schools on time, taking them to separate doctors' appointments, taking them to all their various therapies, and picking them up from school on time, just so we can hurry back home, eat dinner, and spend more time driving around to their after school activities. And this is with just two children.

So, yes, although it defies all logic, I seem to have even less time now that my children are in school.

A New Chapter in My Life

With the new year, some changes have come my way.  Homeschooling children with special needs has taken a toll on me and on the entire family.  The burden of being the only one in charge of my children's education on top of all the demands of parenting special needs children was too great. Slowly, but surely, the Lord was guiding me down a different path.  One that would free me up to be a better mother, a better wife, and just a better person.  This month I made the difficult decision to place my children in what homeschoolers' refer to as "brick and mortar" schools.

This was not an easy decision, but it's the right one for us right now. So now, instead of homeschooling my children all day long, I'll be spending a large portion of my day driving them back and forth to their new schools. I'm sure that I'll be just as busy as I was before.

Fighting Over OIAJ

Would you believe that there was once a day when I didn't know what OIAJ was?  Yes, I remember that day. Of course, at the time, I didn't know that it was one of the most amazing inventions in the food world. I was at the gym that day, running on the treadmill, when two of my running friends were talking about how much they liked Oatmeal in a Jar.  They were going on, and on, and on about this thing until I finally said, "Okay, what in the world is Oatmeal in a Jar?"  They looked at me like I was crazy.  They couldn't believe that I didn't know what it was.

They explained that they heard about it from Kath Eats Real Food and that it was an amazing and easy way to eat oatmeal.  All you do is take an almost empty jar of nut or seed butter, add some oatmeal and other goodies, shake it up, and put the full jar in the fridge overnight.  Then, when you wake up in the morning, you just take the jar out and eat the now ready oatmeal. No need to cook it.  No kidding!

I seriously thought they were crazy.  Really? Because eating uncooked oatmeal did not sound yummy to me.  Time went on, as it usually does, and lo-and behold what do I have in my hands?  An almost empty jar of peanut butter, and, of course, like the rational person that I am, I immediately think of Oatmeal in a Jar.

So there I was, holding an almost empty jar of peanut butter, having the urge to make OIAJ, but there was one problem.  I had no idea how to make OIAJ.  Sure, I knew that it involved putting oatmeal in a jar, silly, but it couldn't be that simple, right?  There had to be a recipe or a special technique or something.

So I Google it.  I go back to Kath Eats Real Food. I Google it again and decide, "What the heck.  I'll just make up a recipe with things that I have laying around the kitchen."  So in the almost empty jar of peanut butter, I added:

• 1/2 cup of old fashioned whole oats
• 3/4 cup rice milk
• 1 tablespoon of raisins
• 1 tablespoon of sliced almonds.  

I shook the jar up, and put it in the fridge.

The next morning, I added some sweetener to the jar, stirred it up, and ate it. It was really yummy. It was so yummy that everyone else in the house that was listening to me going on, and on, and on about how yummy it was, wanted one too.  Well, it's not like we have a whole lot of almost empty jars of nut or seed butters laying around in the refrigerator. So I had to promise that we would take turns eating OIAJ each time we had an empty jar of nut butter.

Everything goes fine with the next two jars, but only if you consider fighting over OIAJ as everything going fine.  Googie gets one. Bubba gets the next one. Then, the third jar. Not to be left out, Hubby wanted his own OIAJ.  So I made one for him with dried cranberries, milk, and crushed pecans.

Next morning comes along and as the kids and I are leaving the house, Googie is frantically pointing and yelling, "Mom, Mom, Mom look what Dad is doing. Look now. Look!"  So I look and see Hubby emptying the OIAJ contents into a microwave bowl.  "He just doesn't get it, does he, Mom?"

"Honey, it's called Oatmeal in a Jar not Oatmeal That Was in a Jar Then Dumped Into a Glass Container, Microwaved, and Eaten Out of a Bowl.  You just don't get it! Yikes, I could have just made "normal" oatmeal for you and given the OIAJ to someone that really appreciated it."

So, now, we are back to fighting over the next OIAJ. I'm not sure who will get the next one, but I'm certain I know who won't be getting OIAJ for quite some time...

My New and Improved Marathon Playlist

I had a great playlist that I used for my last marathon, that is, until I grew tired of it, memorizing all the songs, knowing what song would come next in line, getting tired of the songs. So I thought I would just rearrange a few songs here and there, add some new songs, and "voila!" I would have a new playlist for my next marathon.

Unfortunately, as I found out when I started to put together my new playlist, it wasn't as easy as it sounded, but, finally, success. My playlist is ready, and as I promised in my previous post, here it is. It includes songs that I like, songs that have a beat that work well with running at a 9:00-10:00 minute mile pace, and it includes enough songs to cover about 5 hours of running time, hopefully more than enough time for me to finish the marathon.

I tested this playlist in bits and pieces during the past two weeks.  I had to change some of the songs around a few times, and I am now confident that what I have here is my new and improved playlist.

Well here it is:

Putting Together a Running Playlist for a Marathon

For the longest time I thought that it was silly to listen to music while running.  First, a lot of the running books I have read talked about how it was dangerous to run while listening to music, something about being distracted and not being able to hear what was going on around you.  Then, there was the whole idea of focusing on your form, on your breathing, and on your pace.  And of course,they reasoned, running with music made it difficult to actually enjoy the run. So I ran without music.

Yes, I actually did run without music. And while running without music, I was enjoying the scenery, saying "hi" to other runners, talking to people that were outside, and listening to the wonderful sounds of traffic nature, but the day I went on my first sixteen-mile run, I realized that I would need music to run or I would drive myself crazy.

That's when I started to research music players.  I spent countless hours trying to figure out what music player I needed, how much storage capacity I would need, and how long the batteries lasted.  In the end, I ended up picking the cheapest player I could get that was small, had a capacity of at least 8 gigabytes, and had a decent rating on the various websites.  After that, I thought I would bring the player home, put some music on it, and take it out for a run.

Little did I know that picking the music player was the easy part.  Next, I had to figure out how to put music on it.  It involved downloading software, formatting the player, figuring out how the software worked, and by trial and error I was able to get the player to start working.  Yes, now I was ready to put music on my player.

After a few more hours of loading my CD collection into my computer and transferring the music to my player, I was ready to listen to my music while running.  But wait, not all the songs I owned were good for running.  I quickly found out that a song wasn't good for running simply because I liked it.  No, it wasn't that easy.  The song needed to have the right beat.

So I started my search for good running music.  I checked various websites and asked other runners what songs they liked to listen to while running.  I learned that everyone had their own ideas about what made good running music.  I also learned a lot about beats per minute (bpm) and how important it was to find songs with the correct bpm for your running pace.

This was a good start. I was able to put together a playlist, and I began to run with music. For the record, while running with music, I was still able to enjoy the scenery, I could still say "hi" to other runners, I could still talk to other people that were running with me or were outside, and I could still hear what was going on around me. But after running to the same playlist for close to a year, memorizing not just the songs but the order they came in, and actually beginning to not like a few of the songs on the playlist, I needed to quickly come up with something different.

Therefore, I put together a new playlist for the half marathon I ran this past weekend.  It worked so well, that I decided to put together a brand new playlist for the marathon next month, but this whole experience has been harder than I imagined.  First of all, it will probably take me about five hours to complete the marathon, which means that I will need at least eighty songs on my playlist.  I need eighty songs that are good for running, that I will enjoy while running, that I like, and that I will not tire of quickly.

Currently, I'm still working on the playlist and have about sixty songs picked out.  Once I finalize the playlist, I will post it here in the blog.

Running a Half Marathon as a Training Run

This past weekend I ran the Air Force Half Marathon, and since I am currently training for the Columbus Marathon, I thought I'd use this event as a training run.  It would also give me experience using the new running belt that I was planning to use for the full marathon as well as to try out some new running strategies, namely the strategies where I just run the race for fun and don't even try to set a P.R.

The weather was amazing.  It was a clear day with no rain, which is great because I already have run two races, a half marathon and a full marathon, and a few training runs, in the rain. And although I have claimed that running in the rain is fun, I completely believe that running in clear, cool, sunny conditions is funner.

I have to say that this race was the most fun I'd ever had running, and I really love to run.  The only goals that I had set for this race were to have fun, take it easy, and finish strong.

At the start line, I lined up right behind the 2:20 pace group, since that was my finish time for my last half marathon race, and because I was hoping to run into one of my friends that ran the race last year at the same pace.  I didn't have luck finding her, but I did get a chance to meet some really cool people at the start line.

One of the most exciting things about this race are the flyovers that they have at the start of the race and during the race.  Right before the start, a parachutist came down with the American flag, and some really cool planes (I admit it, I don't know what types of planes they were, but they were pretty cool), flew overhead in formation.  Then, about three minutes later,  a wedge of geese, not to be confused with a wedge of cheese, flew overhead, and we all started to clap and cheer for them just as we had cheered and clapped for the the really cool planes that had flown over a few minutes before.

Finally, we were off, and about four minutes later, I crossed the start line.  I started out slowly.  The 2:20 pace group had taken off.  I kept reminding myself that this was just a training run, and to not hurt myself trying to set a P.R. and then not be able to run the marathon next month because I had overdone it at this race.  That would not be good, right?

Anyway, like I said, I was running slowly when all of a sudden I caught up with the 2:20 pace group.  At that point I decided that I would go ahead and stay with the group, since they seemed to be going at a leisurely pace and I was having fun hanging out with them.  The pace group leader was great at keeping everyone in the group focused and on pace.

Then, all of a sudden it was mile 8, well that's the way it felt anyway.  I was running, and then it's mile 8.  Weird, huh?  At that point I realized that maybe I had gotten faster from last year and that maybe this pace was not fast enough for me, so I picked up the pace.  I was passing people right and left, and I wasn't even trying to pass them.

Soon I was seeing people from the 2:10 pace group, and that really freaked me out.  There's no way I'm running this race at that pace, right?  Next, I'm at mile 10 and feeling strong.  Well, from this point on it's basically just a 5K race, I tell myself, so I pick up the pace again, and end up finishing the race at 2:13:31.

Okay, I was really excited. 2:13 is not going to make headlines in Runner's World magazine, but it was great news to me.  Maybe this strategy of not trying to set a P.R. is the correct strategy.  I didn't push myself, had fun, and set a P.R.

After the race I found some of my Team in Training friends.  We were hanging around, drinking our free beer and I was like, "Maybe this is the way to run a full marathon.  You run 13.1 miles, stop to eat pizza, drink some beer, and then go out and run another 13.1."  Maybe I was crazy.  Maybe I was high on endorphins, but I really felt great; however, before I actually set out to run the course again, someone handed me another beer coupon (maybe to shut me up?), so I had no need to run the race again.

This weekend, I will be running a 20-mile training run, the longest run before the actual race.  I just hope I feel at least half as good as I did after this race.

It's the Most Wonderful Time

No, I'm not talking about vacation time or free time (not that I even know what free time is), what I'm talking about is Back to School time. This year, we didn't have a great summer filled with wonderful memories, great vacations, time at the pool, or relaxing moments in the backyard.  We actually had a pretty stressful summer that actually went by too quickly.  I barely had time to do the things that needed to be done, let alone have time to do the fun things we wanted to do this summer.  Anyway, because of the terribleness of our summer, this year, Back to School time means back to a routine, back to business, and interestingly enough it has also led to more things getting done, and less stress.

Right now we're on our third week of school, and things have gone along rather smoothly.  The key has been making sure that we all get to bed early and get up early.  This way we have been able to get our school work completed before 3:00 p.m.  Makes a lot of sense, right?  I mean most schools operate this way.  The students go to school for six hours and are usually done by 3:00 p.m.  So I figured, why not?  Why not try doing things this way.

This was actually a new idea to us because as a homeschooling family, not only do we decide how we will be educating our children, we also get to set our own daily schedule.  And when you don't have someone telling you that the children have to be in school at a specific time in the morning, it's easy to start the school work later and later each day, until you push the start time all the way to noon, and end up with a hectic afternoon schedule with tired, grumpy children trying to focus on their work while all the other children in the neighborhood are back from school.

Setting a homeschool start time early in the morning has been one of the best decisions we have made for our homeschool this year, and even though we don't get to ship our children off to school for six hours a day, Back to School time has been the most wonderful time for us.