Living Vicariously

Anyone who knows me, knows that I am obsessed with tennis. I love every single thing about the sport. Being a lifelong soccer player, tennis has now taken over. After the babies, I might not even play soccer anymore (although I do always seem to get sucked back in). Anyway, being pregnant and not being able to play tennis has been very hard.

Despite appearances, I love being active. Before we got pregnant, I was training for a half marathon, playing on two soccer teams and about 4 tennis teams. It was really really hard to drop my level of activity to only swimming or walking. I don’t mind those two things, but for me to really get into an exercise, it needs to be a game. To me, there is no game in walking, which until recently when the weather warmed up, was my only option. Although if I'm being honest, the idea of getting into a bathing suit right now isn't top of my list...

Either way, the bottom line is that I miss tennis. As long as I can remember, the Jacksonville area has hosted a women's tennis tournament. It used to be out in Amelia Island, but last year it moved closer to us at the beach. It's called the MPS Group Championships and can be found here:

www.mpsgroupchamps.net

Last year I volunteered there in player services and had the best time, so I did it again this year. I am so glad I did! While the draw is smaller than most tournaments, and not a lot of the "big name" players come, I love it. I love getting to see the up and comers...and even the girls who are ranked in the 200's in the world are amazing players. So this year, I again volunteered in player services, watched a ton of tennis and had a blast.

I wonder if next year I'll be able to volunteer with two little ones at home?

Ultrasound on Thursday!! Stewart and I are ready to see the babies again!

April Fools COP Style

I had stayed up late last night studying for our PTX exam today. I slept in a little and then eventually went back to school this morning to continue studying. There was nothing else going on at school today so when I arrived in the lab there was no one there. I sat down in the same place I had occupied for most of the night an proceeded to continue reading the review I had downloaded from the message board. I got a text message from Andrew telling me the PBD grades from last week were up. I thought about it for a little while and decided that I wouldn’t look at it. I was not confident of what grade I would get. After reading some more of the review I responded to Andrew by asking what he got on the exam. He said he did well and got a mid nineties score. Figuring that was his usual effort and I would be okay I checked my score - 41.

I have not done that badly in any test in Pharmacy school. I immediately freaked out. I was not sure what I would tell Caroline or whether I could in fact pass the class with that low a score on an exam. The coming exam next Thursday is apparently the most difficult and if I couldn’t get through this then how would I improve? I felt like I did the few times I did talks in high school when I thought I was going to pass out. I texted Andrew and told him I had failed badly, his response was April Fools 41 is a joke.
“What” was my response

“They fooled us Everyone has a 41” he replied
to which I texted "

"Where is the real grade?" not realising that he had made up the fact he got a ninety something

“Not up yet” was his reply

“That is messed up.
How did you know this” I didn't actually use the word messed but you get the idea of what i was conveying

“EVERYONE has a 41” I don't think he realised I had figured it out at this point

“Yeah I am reading the message board now” Which I was finding that everyone had panicked to some degree and I was not the only one that got caught out.

I am not sure that i recovered by this afternoon when we took the PTX exam but lucky for me there were 15 Brand/Generic medicine questions and I got all them right to make up somewhat for the mess I made of the multiple choice.

Gummy Bears

That's what our babies look like! This morning we had our 10 week ultrasound. The babies have grown so much. What started as little blobs now have heads, arms and legs! They were bouncing around this morning - moving their little arms and legs. Here is the picture:
Twin one is clearly visible...but twin two is harder to see - he looks like a blur! But they're both there, and we even got to hear the heartbeats!!!

Pretty amazing stuff, huh?

Half Marathon Report

I should have written this right after the race, but I was busy with school type stuff so it had to wait for Spring Break (WOOHOO). By The Way expect lots more entries in the summer when I am not in school and just trying to juggle a job (fingers crossed a pharmacy internship) and a pregnant wife.

So the Donna Half Marathon we were training for was held on the 21st of February. Caroline had to stop training for medical reasons which are obvious now, but at the time were mystifying to the other people training. I had done all the group training runs properly using the Galloway walk-run technique. My group was running four minutes and walking one minute. Two weeks before the race I had run fourteen miles in 2:01 so my goal for the actual half-marathon was to run under two hours. I had not been running the twice weekly sessions at home because it was so cold.

The morning of the race I drove to the parking garage and caught the shuttle. We drove out to the start line and when I got off the bus I just followed the crowd towards the “Runners Village”. It was a bunch of vendors tents which I was not interested in. I heard a guy calling groups of numbers by their colour and I realized he was almost at my colour (I think it was light blue-just checked the website fotos and I am correct). I joined that group of people and we were soon led out to the start line. I think one more group was put in front of us then the elite runners. I was freezing which didn’t help and they had to play the national anthem and talk about how great it was that we were all out there.

The race finally started and I followed the Galloway advice of not running too fast to start off. I got to one mile in about 10 minutes and started my timer. I proceeded to run/walk for the rest of the way along JTB. When we got to the beach and the roads narrowed I had trouble hearing my timer so I had to switch it to my wrist so that I didn’t spend 3 minutes walking like I did at one point. The supporters on the edges of the road were everywhere and I really didn’t like it. By the time I got to run on the actual beach I was worrying about the time I was taking but continued with the run/walk system that I had trained with. By the time we got back to JTB I was very tired and getting increasingly concerned about my time. I latched onto a runner going past me and followed him for the last 2 miles with no walk breaks managing to sneak in under the 2 hour limit I had set for myself.

I am glad I did the race and now I can say that I have done a half marathon but at the same time I was not happy with the time and how I felt throughout the race. Caroline tried to convince me that the reason I didn’t feel good was because I had stopped with the training runs during the week and that may well have been the case, but I did run the Gate River Run three weeks later (running the whole way) with no ill effects and no sore legs the next day?

Changes

New heading added!! Pictures and updates to follow.

New Heading

It looks like we will have to retire this old introduction to the blog "This morning Stewart received a blog post from a co-worker and we finally realized that we are among the last few who do NOT have a blog. So here it is. I'm a bit apprehensive because our friends who have blogs either: a) Are traveling the world b) Are pregnant or c) have children d) Lead marvelous and exciting lives We fall into NONE of these categories. We do have a weird and precocious cat and a mischievous puppy ... we'll see how interesting we can be." Caroline wrote this one so I will encourage her to write the new one. Excited

The Ronson Hangup

The Ronson Hangup are former Anyones Steve and Mal Pinkerton, Even frontman Ash Naylor, the Pictures' bassist Luke Thomas and drummer Dave Mudie. The group is named for the late Mick Ronson, who made his name as one of David Bowie's Spiders From Mars. I somehow stumbled on their debut album on iTunes. It seemed a little strange because there are all sorts of other Aussie bands that I can’t find on iTunes (USA). That aside I put it on my wish list because of the Even connection and then bought it when I found out it was an Even/Anyones collaboration. It is an interesting album, I don’t have the liner notes so I don’t know who the exact songwriters are. I am also interested to know who they recruited to sing the female part on the song Sally Melo. While waiting for the new Even album this is just what I need.