This is a blog car­ni­val from 5 Min­utes for Books. It’s held the 4th Tues­day of each month, and it’s a blast! I get a lot of great rec­om­men­da­tions and a few new blogs for my feed reader each month by click­ing through to oth­ers’ posts.

What

Last month, I set forth a nearly impos­si­ble read­ing goal for myself. Instead of read­ing all the books faith­fully on my list, I got side tracked. I read the first two books in the Twi­light series, Twi­light and New Moon. I will be com­pletely hon­est this month and I’ll admit that right now the other two books are the pri­or­ity on my read­ing list. I’m wait­ing for Eclipse to be returned to the library and then I’ll read Break­ing Dawn right after that. Right now, I’m read­ing Eat. Love. Pray. and I have to admit, I’m not lov­ing it. I’m def­i­nitely look­ing for a diver­sion. So, if any­one knows who has that copy of Eclipse that is 2 weeks over­due, tell them to take it back! Nor­mal read­ing plans of way too many books in way too few days will be resumed next month.

That is what some­one told us that we should buy for K. He LOVES music. He likes to lis­ten to music. He loves wed­ding dances. (Remem­ber Michaela’s dance?) He often breaks out into song or requests that Jason or I sing to him. When he was younger, I found him one day danc­ing to a radio com­mer­cial that had no music only talking.

At church, he adores our wor­ship leader. Z is a younger man. He is a bit older than college-aged, and K loves him. One time, we went to church out of town with my in-laws, and before church started, K stood up on my lap and looked around. “Where Z go? Music???” He wanted to know how in the world a church could have music with­out Z. K gen­er­ally comes to the church ser­vice with us for either the begin­ning or clos­ing wor­ship. Last week, he came, and as I was hold­ing him, he started singing along with one of the songs. He was singing dif­fer­ent words than every­one else in the sanc­tu­ary, but it didn’t mat­ter to him, to us, or to God. It was adorable.

Get­ting back to the title of the post, gui­tar, drums, and a piano. Well, we have 2/3 of those, and what we don’t have K is tak­ing care of on his own. I have a piano from my years of piano lessons as an ele­men­tary, junior high, and high schooler. A cou­ple years ago, Jason showed some inter­est in learn­ing to play gui­tar, so I bought him one for Christ­mas. K has taken the drums into his own hands. This is a video I took on my phone ear­lier today.

Wow! I never thought that K would actu­ally be a 3 year old. I also never thought that he would be a breast­feed­ing 3 year old. When he was born, my ini­tial goal was 6 weeks. Then, I thought 3 months would be doable. After that, I decided to fol­low his cues.

K has always been a child who needed a lot of phys­i­cal con­tact. He likes to be held. He likes to hold hands. He likes to climb into my lap and play. For him, I think that nurs­ing has been more about phys­i­cal con­tact and recon­nect­ing than the milk. Of course, he likes the milk. When I recently went on a week­end trip, I left frozen milk pri­mar­ily for A, but I think that K drank as much as A did. Some peo­ple crave Coca-Cola. Some peo­ple like milk or water or beer. K LOVES a glass of “mommy milk.” In fact, the first time I gave him a cup of pumped milk, he stood in the kitchen and chugged it. When he was done, there was milk run­ning down his face. Jason and I were laugh­ing so hard. Now, if I’m going to be gone at bed­time, he’s on the look­out for a glass of milk.

I have got­ten some looks and some unsup­port­ive com­ments about my choice to 1) nurse K for almost 3 years and 2) do that while tan­dem nurs­ing A (15 months). If I’m hon­est, I think that it makes me sad more than any­thing else that peo­ple think that there’s some­thing weird, wrong, or odd about our choices. I don’t think that every­one should or can nurse for 3+ years or tan­dem nurse. I just wish that peo­ple would real­ize that it’s an option and it’s not as crazy as it sounds.

Well, since I let the secret out last week, I fig­ured that I should con­tinue to update any­one who is inter­ested on how my run­ning is going.  Jason ran a 10K race on Sat­ur­day, and I took the boys to find him on the course and wave to him, and then we met him at the fin­ish line.  He did so well!  I was so proud of him.    (Because my hus­band rocks!)  In addi­tion to feel­ing proud, though, I also felt moti­vated.  If he is already run­ning 10K races in under an hour, I need to get myself in gear and get work­ing on my training.

Between my post last week and his great time in the race, I had the extra moti­va­tion I needed last night to com­plete my 3rd work­out of the week.  Gen­er­ally, I run Mon­day, Wednes­day, and Fri­day or Sat­ur­day depend­ing on our week­end sched­ule.  Monday’s run went pretty well.  I ran about 1.5 miles, and then I took a short walk­ing break before I fin­ished the last mile.  Wednes­day was TERRIBLE!  I’m not sure what hap­pened.  I felt tired almost as soon as I started run­ning, and I only made it to about 1.75 miles before I ended up walk­ing the rest.  Ugh, it was dis­ap­point­ing and frus­trat­ing.  Then, on Sat­ur­day, we went to my sister-in-law and brother-in-law’s house for my niece’s fourth birth­day.  We got home late, and I had a greasy piece of yummy pizza for sup­per fol­lowed up by some birth­day cake and ice cream.  I was pretty sure that Saturday’s run was going to mir­ror the one I’d had on Wednes­day, but I decided to give it a try (as spurred on by the 2 pre­vi­ously men­tioned moti­va­tors!).  I ran the first mile and a half at my usual pace of 4.2 miles per hour.  Then, since I was feel­ing good, I decided to run the next half mile at 4.5.  I went back down to 4.2 for .75 miles, and then I did the last .25 miles at 4.5.  I was really happy about that run.  I felt good while I was doing it.  I ran the entire dis­tance.  I increased my speed a lit­tle, and I made my goal!

After that run, I decided that I needed to get seri­ous about mak­ing a plan.  Jason had used the Hal Hig­don 10K run­ning plan for his race yes­ter­day.  He felt like it pre­pared him well, and he was quite sat­is­fied with it.  I decided to (again) fol­low his lead, and start­ing a week from tomor­row, I’m going to start that plan, too.  I’m a lit­tle ner­vous about it, but I’m hop­ing that things will progress grad­u­ally from here on out.

Since my other post, I’ve had a few peo­ple visit with me about running.

“Doesn’t it make your feet hurt?”  Sur­pris­ingly, no.  In the begin­ning, I had hoped it would so I would have an excuse to quit.

“I’ve tried run­ning, but I just don’t enjoy it.”  I started run­ning in June.  I def­i­nitely did not enjoy it in the begin­ning.  I’m not quite sure I would say that I enjoy it now either, but I can say that it does feel good.  It makes me feel strong and, I know it’s good for me.

I’m not say­ing that every­one should run or that I’m for sure going to be able to run the half marathon in May, but I do think that there’s some­thing to be said for mak­ing a goal and stick­ing with it even if it is *very* much out­side your com­fort zone.  That’s essen­tially my goal.  I think the 13.1 miles are secondary.

I’ve been count­ing down in my head to my 100th post for a while now. Then, I real­ized that I missed it! Whoops. So, for my 101st post on this blog, I decided to do a list of 101 things about me (and my fam­ily). Here it is:

1. My mom and I shared a hos­pi­tal room with my high school best friend and her mom when we were born (2 days apart).
2. We didn’t find out about that until we were 17 years old, because we weren’t from the same town until her fam­ily moved at age 14.
3. When I was younger, I thought I would become a nurse, a teacher, and a pet store employee when I grew up.
4. When I was around 7 or 8 years old, I started putting the same 3 items on my Christ­mas list every year: a phone in my room, a pet, and another brother or sister.
5. I have one sibling.
6. I never got any of those things.
7. Before I could read (well), my par­ents used to give me the mail addressed to “Cur­rent Res­i­dent” and tell me it was for me.
8. They gave me mail­ings from Byron Dor­gan and told me he was send­ing me mail.
9. I believed them until I was far too old to believe that sort of thing.
10. I had a great childhood.
11. I have great parents.
12. Most of my child­hood mem­o­ries revolve around play­ing at the neigh­bor hood park, play­ing with friends in my yard, or being with my extended family.
13. I learned to read before kindergarten.
14. I have loved to read for as long as I can remember.
15. When my brother had bowl­ing league, I spent the time at the library
16. I’m not sure he’d appre­ci­ate me remind­ing peo­ple he was in a bowl­ing league.
17. Fourth grade was my favorite year of ele­men­tary school. Thanks, Mrs. Becker!
18. By 6th grade, I had read nearly all the children/youth books in our library and checked out a Stephen King novel.
19. My sixth grade teacher called my par­ents to see what they thought about me hav­ing that book.
20. I didn’t actu­ally read it. It was a lit­tle too creepy for my age.
21. When I was in sev­enth grade, I had my first sort-of-real boyfriend.
22. We didn’t date or call each other or any­thing, but we were “together.”
23. When I was a junior in high school, I had two teach­ers tell me that he still “had the hots” for me.
24. I doubt the truth of #22.
25. I have been a North Dakota res­i­dent my entire life.
26. I flew on an air­plane for the first time when I was 16. I went to St. Louis, Mis­souri with 3 class­mates and a teacher from my school.
27. FHA (now known as FCCLA) was respon­si­ble for most of my travel prior to turn­ing 18.
28. Because of FCCLA, I was able to go to St. Louis, MO, New Orleans, LA, and Tokyo, Japan.
29. I spent 6 weeks in Japan with a host fam­ily the sum­mer I was 17.
30. I climbed (part of) Mt. Fuji.
31. I lived in cen­tral Tokyo when I was in Japan.
32. My Japan­ese fam­ily drove a Ford minivan.
33. When I was in Tokyo, I felt like I could not breathe because there were so many peo­ple and build­ings all around.
34. When I came home from Japan, I remem­ber what North Dakota air smelled like as I stepped off the airplane.
35. The only rea­son I needed to attend 4 years of high school was for my senior eng­lish and my senior social stud­ies class. I had enough classes/credits to grad­u­ate after 3 years.
36. I wanted to be a marine biol­o­gist when I was in high school.
37. That is not very likely when you live in North Dakota.
38. When I wrote my senior eng­lish paper about my future career, I chose civil engineering.
39. I was an engi­neer­ing major for 3 days in college.
40. I also majored in speech lan­guage pathology.
41. and ath­letic training
42. and ele­men­tary education
43. and mid­dle school education.
44. I stuck with the last two.
45. I have a dual major in ele­men­tary and mid­dle level education.
46. I have a mas­ters in spe­cial education.
47. I met my hus­band, Jason, in my first semes­ter of college.
48. I knew who he was in a class of 150ish people.
49. He didn’t know me, but it all worked out in the end.
50. We offi­cially met at a Cam­pus Cru­sade for Christ Christ­mas Conference.
51. We dated for 10 months
52. and broke up for a year and a half.
53. Then, we dated for 8 months,
54. were engaged for 8 moths,
55. and got mar­ried in June of 2002.
56. Jason says that he knew we would get mar­ried the night we first met.
57. It took me another 3 years to fig­ure that out.
58. I don’t like the ends of chicken strips.
59. I don’t really like most meat at all.
60. If I had my choice, I would be vegetarian.
61. I have two sons.
62. I had two unmed­icated labors.
63. I am breast­feed­ing both my 15 month old and my almost 3 year old (will be 3 on Nov 3).
64. I am mar­ried to an early adopter (some­one who jumps onto new trends early).
65. I am not an early adopter.
66. Jason has intro­duced me to blogging,
67. NPR/MPR,
68. and being polit­i­cally moderate.
69. I’m no good at mod­er­a­tion. I like all or nothing.
70. I used to teach spe­cial edu­ca­tion before I had K.
71. When I tell peo­ple that, they say, “you must be really patient.”
72. I laugh when they say that.
73. I am a very emo­tional person.
74. I am eas­ily moved to cry.
75. There is a CVS com­mer­cial that makes me cry.
76. I like the Pixar movie Cars more than my son, I think.
77. I am plan­ning to run a half marathon in May of 2009.
78. I used to think that I wanted to have six children.
79. Now, I’m not sure how many I want.
80. For the first two years of our mar­riage, I did almost no cooking.
81. We had a rota­tion of about 4 meals that we used to space out meals in restaurants.
82. In the sum­mer of 2004, I decided to start try­ing one new meal a week.
83. Now we usu­ally eat 2–4 new meals a week.
84. I am try­ing to get rid of high fruc­tose corn syrup in our house.
85. I love cin­na­mon rolls.
86. I love caramel rolls.
87. I once found (what I think was) a cock­roach in the base­ment of the apart­ment building/house we were liv­ing it.
88. I put it in a sand­wich bag and left it on the kitchen table to show to Jason when he got home from work.
89. Think­ing about that now still gives me the creeps.
90. I some­times get the urge to move some­where far away from North Dakota.
91. I will prob­a­bly never move all that far from North Dakota…maybe Moor­head or East Grand Forks?
92. I am pas­sion­ate about breast­feed­ing and the ben­e­fits of breast­milk for moms and babies.
93. I am becom­ing more and more inter­ested and pas­sion­ate about con­ser­va­tion, green liv­ing, fair trade, and organic food.
94. I want to learn to knit
95. I have started play­ing the piano again, but our piano badly needs to be tuned.
96. I am pleased with where my life is 10 years after high school graduation.
97. I miss my brother and sister-in-law and wish they lived closer.
98. I love to watch football
99. and hockey.
100. Hav­ing kids has sig­nif­i­cantly reduced my sports watch­ing time.
101. Ide­ally, if I have more chil­dren, I would love to give birth to them at The Farm.

There you have it! Those are my 101 things. If you got all the way to the end, I’m impressed!

A cou­ple months ago, I found Paper Bridges through a car­ni­val from 5 Min­utes for Books. I clicked around her site and found sev­eral inter­est­ing posts. One of them was a book give­away. I entered and won this book. She has another book give­away going now. If you have ever heard of or read For Men Only or For Women Only, you might enjoy hav­ing this book even if it’s not directed at you. If you have (or will soon have) a teenage boy, you def­i­nitely will enjoy this book. Click on over and check it out!

I’ve writ­ten a lit­tle about my hus­band, Jason, and how he’s very ded­i­cated to his run­ning. In fact, I am jeal­ous. I’m not really jeal­ous of the time he spends run­ning (although catch me on a crabby day and that might be true, too), but I’m more jeal­ous of the fact that he really sticks to things. He says he’s going to achieve a goal, and he does. There’s really no ques­tion about if. We just wait to see when it will hap­pen. In May of this year, he ran the 5K at the Fargo Marathon. He decided next year that he’d like to run the half marathon. Yikes! So, in a step along the way, he is reg­is­tered to run the 10K at our University’s home­com­ing cel­e­bra­tion this week­end. Yay, Jason!

This leads me to a lit­tle bit of an admis­sion. I have actu­ally been run­ning also for a while. We have a tread­mill, and I started doing the Couch to 5K plan in June. I didn’t tell any­one though. I didn’t want to have any pres­sure put on me if I didn’t like it or if I decided to stop. Then, I real­ized some­thing. I real­ized that if I really wanted to keep up with run­ning I needed a goal. I also needed to tell peo­ple so they could put pres­sure on me and keep me account­able! So, I’m going to do it. I’m mak­ing a goal (gulp) and telling peo­ple about it. My goal is to run the half marathon in Fargo in May of 2009 with Jason. (My heart is beat­ing faster as I’m typ­ing this…not a good sign for my phys­i­cal fit­ness.) I’m cur­rently run­ning 2.5 miles at a time with a goal of run­ning 3 times a week.

Since I have a Nike+iPod Sport Kit, I can track my progress pretty closely. AND, since you now know that this is my goal, I guess I’m going to be telling you about how my run­ning is going every week.

He does. He is a great hus­band. He’s an amaz­ing dad. He’s a smart, funny, intel­li­gent, good look­ing, car­ing, lov­ing per­son. I’m guess­ing you get the picture.

At the con­ven­tion I attended over the week­end, there was a resource fair with tons of ven­dors. There were pub­lish­ers, music artists, and many other booths. I did a lit­tle bit of shop­ping at the fair and a lit­tle bit of brows­ing. I came across a booth that sold t-shirts, and I knew I wanted one. I’m cur­rently try­ing to cut back on my stash of t-shirts, but these were dif­fer­ent. I wanted one. Heck, I wanted them all! The t-shirts are made by a com­pany called From­Me­Tees. The two women work­ing at the booth were wear­ing shirts that said, “my hus­band rocks.”

Any­one who knows me in real life knows that I can’t stop talk­ing about Jason and every­thing he does that rocks. He does every­thing! He does laun­dry. He does dishes. He stays home with the boys when I go to Texas for a week­end. He sits on the couch with me and watches Veron­ica Mars. Let me count the ways.. I decided that instead of con­tin­u­ing to talk about him all the time and how great he is, I would just wear a shirt that could do the talk­ing for me. Instead of get­ting the one that said “my hus­band rocks,” I decided on “For­ever His Bride.” I wore the shirt for about half of today, and I have to say I love it! It just puts me in a pos­i­tive frame of mind when I think about Jason. It reminds me how much I love him and how much he loves me. It also helps me to keep things in per­spec­tive if I ever start to get a lit­tle frus­trated with him. When I first bought the shirt, I thought it was just a cute shirt. Now, after wear­ing it a cou­ple times, it is def­i­nitely still a very cute shirt, but it’s also more.

Some of you may (or may not) have noticed that my blog has been a lit­tle quiet for the past week. This is pri­mar­ily due to the fact that I was not around from Thurs­day to Sun­day. I had the oppor­tu­nity to attend the MOPS Inter­na­tional 2008 Con­ven­tion.

The week­end was filled with speak­ers, authors, artists, and time to get to know oth­ers from my local group. Because our local group has helped us with fundrais­ing for lead­er­ship train­ing like this, one of the other women who attended and I are going to be giv­ing a lit­tle recap of our week­end tomor­row at our meet­ing. When I got to think­ing about what I wanted to say, I had a list that was far too long for the time I’ll be given. I am try­ing to whit­tle down two and a half days of infor­ma­tion into about two and a half minutes.

The final gen­eral ses­sion that we attended was where it all came together for me. All week­end, we had been asked to wear but­tons that said SDWSC on them. Peo­ple had all sorts of guesses what that could mean, and on Sat­ur­day after­noon, we finally learned. It meant, “she did what she could.” Elisa Mor­gan, the CEO of MOPS, was speak­ing that after­noon. She talked about Mary bring­ing per­fume to Jesus and seem­ingly wast­ing it in an elab­o­rate ges­ture of pour­ing it over his head (Mark 14). Then, she elab­o­rated on the sen­tence “She did what she could.” Mary gave what she had. She did what God had asked of her. She didn’t look around to see what oth­ers were doing. She didn’t trade her per­fume for some­thing more use­ful. She didn’t sit around wish­ing that she knew how to sing a beau­ti­ful song or write a breath­tak­ing poem. She did what she could. That right there was the Big Idea for me.

In addi­tion to our gen­eral ses­sions, we also had smaller ses­sions through­out the day on Fri­day. My first ses­sion was geared toward rais­ing chil­dren with a con­cern about the world, the envi­ron­ment, and how our actions affect oth­ers. The speaker, Tracey Bianchi, talked about teach­ing your chil­dren to love some­thing and become pas­sion­ate about it. Then, once they love it, what­ever that it is, they will be more likely to pro­tect it and try to save it. The “it” might be a cer­tain pop­u­la­tion of peo­ple, a type of ani­mal, an aspect of the envi­ron­ment, or some­thing else entirely. Although she gave many ideas, I didn’t leave her ses­sion feel­ing over­whelmed, I felt moti­vated. I want my kids and my fam­ily to be socially aware. I want us to make a pos­i­tive impact on the world. This includes the envi­ron­ment and, as much as pos­si­ble, peo­ple on the other side of the world, too. I also had two other great ses­sions. I have a cou­ple many new books on my to be read list. There is so much I could say tomor­row about this con­fer­ence, but what really sticks out is that she did what she could. That’s what God expects of me. That’s what I should expect of myself. I don’t need to do every­thing, but I do need to do what I can when I can.

5MinutesForMom is hav­ing a sleep­ing angel con­test. They are giv­ing away a South Shore Children’s Bed­room Set from Home & Bed­room Fur­ni­ture. They are ask­ing peo­ple to post pic­tures of their sleep­ing babies, and the win­ner will have their choice of either the Lily Rose or the Sum­mer Breeze set. I would def­i­nitely choose Sum­mer Breeze if I were to win.

So, here is the pic­ture. It’s adorable, and it’s one of my favorites. We were at Jason’s par­ents’ house one day this sum­mer. I ran a few errands, and when I came back, I walked in the front door and saw this…

My Sleep­ing Angels