Vacation
This week, we decided to take a vacation. In figuring out what we wanted to do, we purchased a family membershhip to teh Frederik Meijer Gardens. They've put in a new Children's Garden where kids can do all sorts of fun stuff--float toy boats in pools shaped like the Great Lakes, play in a giant sandbox, sit on concrete "eggs" in a giant nest among other things. The membership has mostly paid for itself already, seeing as we've gone twoice just in the last week. And we still haven't been to all of it--it's a huge place! The kids love it, and if the toy boats were the only thing in the children's garden, they wouldn't care, they could have played with the boats all day!

My friend Beth also had us out to her farm one evening. Beth keeps ducks, sheep, chickens, a goat, a goose, and a llama. I did not know there were so many varieties of chickens. Beth keeps several varieties of chickens, many of which are quite beautiful. The kids spent much of the time there watching the chickens. Becca was a little afraid of the animals at first, but was very interested in watching them from behind the fence. We also walked around Beth's beautiful flower garden for a while. Beth also showed us some bags of wool from her sheep and llama--it's amazing how different the raw wool is from what we see in sweaters--we're so removed from the process of seeing it go from the sheep to the sweater and don't know what it takes or what it's like at first before it's processed.

We have also just had some free time to hang around and play with the kids at home, or take them to the playground. We are finding that Becca is beginning to speak in complete sentences (saying "There's a boat" when we were watching boats in the Holland, MI channel) and Abby has occasionally been saying very funny things herself. One day, she brought me a Fisher-Price bus that Becca recently received on her 2nd birthday, and proudly told me that "I bought this for two-ninety-nine, from Becca." I laughed so hard when she told me this that it scared her and she began to cry inconsolably. I kept telling her that what she said was so cute and funny, and I wasn't trying to hurt her feelings. My mother-in-law tells me that Abby is beginning to have a sense of self-consciousness. That is probably what is going on with her.

Marathon training is going well. I've been doing my runs a bit later than the 5:30 AM that I usually wake up to do them because of vacation, but I am scheduled to run 10 miles this weekend. I did nine miles last weekend, and found that it is exactly nine miles from my house to Reeds Lake in East Grand Rapids, around it, and back. It was stunningly beautiful to see the sunrise over Reeds Lake in the morning. I feel fortunate to live in a place where there are places of great beauty to be seen during training runs. Who can't use more natural beauty in their lives?
- posted by Kristen @ 7/08/2004 08:14:00 AM