The MOJO Family: Jason's birthday

Lots of reasons to celebrate this week.

1) Ava took a bottle! Actually, she took 3 bottles on Thurs when I spent the day at work. I didn't see her for almost 10 hours and she did awesome. Hurray!!!

2) Jason had a birthday on Friday. He had a big day at school - his DECA districts competition was in Denver and it all went quite well. He had at least 3 students qualify for States, and all of the organizing and judging went well.

Friday night we got a sitter and went out on a date after the kids went to sleep. We used a gift card to a great pizza/tap house place we received while I was pregnant, and had a great time just connecting. We also tried something crazy called bacon peanut brittle. We both love brittle - the toffee/sugar part - but we weren't sure about the bacon addition. I also sampled 3 beers which was really fun.

3) Aunt Cynthia is in town visiting cousin Kelsey. Not only is it fun to see her, but this morning Rachel played at Kelsey's art studio/Cynthia watched the girls while Jason and I went running. We ran 10 miles (16km), which was a huge accomplishment for me. It was hard. It was really, really windy but even without the wind, that distance was hard.

I run my half marathon (13.1 miles) on Dec 7th and have two more long runs planned before then. I think I'm going to need everything to work out really well for me to make my goal of running under 2:25 in order to qualify for the Pikes Peak Ascent. I know for most runners that is really slow, but that's a reasonable challenge for me right now. I'll have to run a little bit faster than I did today and for 3 extra miles...yikes! One day I hope to run a half marathon under 2 hours, which I've never quite done, but it isn't going to be any time too soon! (It might have to be at sea level when it does happen!)

Regardless, I feel great that I got the 10 miles under my belt. I can run 6 miles (10km) quite comfortably now... but after that things start to get tough. I would prefer if I could run 8.5 miles quite comfortably and then have to push through less than 5 miles, but I'm not sure I'm going to be there by race day.